Posted on 06/14/2011 1:33:45 PM PDT by Halfmanhalfamazing
Last week, Santa Rosa-based Internet service provider Sonic.net rolled out a blazing fast new fiber optic network that will provide Sonoma County residents with the fastest residential Internet in the United States at an extremely competitive price. Sonic.net's new offering blasts a hole in the arguments of "Net Neutrality" proponents who fear that ISPs will raise prices and limit quality Internet access without government regulation.
Sonic.net's fastest service package will be 1Gbps (gigabits per second) at only $70 a month, and will include two phone lines and unlimited long distance calls. It will also offer a 100 megabit per second connection for $40 a month, which will include one phone line and unlimited long distance calling. Technology columnist Nate Anderson marvelled at the price last week, writing:
'Where I live in Chicago, Comcast's 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 ("premium installation" and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month.'
(Excerpt) Read more at caivn.org ...
Well that’s great, since one small ISP offers a good product, that must negate the other 99.99% of us who don’t live there.
sfl
I’m stuck here in central Florida with only one available ISP, AT&T (very rural area). The best they offer is 6meg down/half meg up for $45.mo. Other ISPs’ just out of our reach offer more than twice that for only $4/mo more. Try using 3 PCs and a Wii on a 6/.5 meg circuit when your teenage daughter is streaming Beiber and Glee videos. AT&T obviously are unaware of the 21st century and multi-PC households. 6/.5 meg circuits are OK if you’re a granny reading email and surfing the web for early-bird dinner coupons, but not much more.
I’ve got fiber optic and it is amazing.
Living in a rural/less populated area has its costs. We had had fiber optic at our old house, but when we moved (@ 15mi), it was not available. It just makes business sense: why invest to serve/maintain 1 household/customer per sq. mile vs. 600 in one city block?
About 12 or so years ago, our municipality had a deal with AT&T, which made them the sole provider to our town (This is a common thing here in Illinois). The deal gave a percentage of the bills to the town,in return for no competition.
Several of the towns all around us were getting DSL at the time, and we could only get dial up, and it was some outrageous price of like $50 a month, plus it was down constantly. You would call them to report an outage, or try and get some of your bill refunded and you would be on hold for at least an hour.
It became a campaign point on the next election, as more and more folks needed internet for work, and businesses needed it as well, but nope, it was just dial up.
The new city council that was elected tossed out AT&T, and opened the market. We had cable access then by the end of the summer. The best part is, year after year AT&T comes door to door trying to get folks to sign up for their cable TV and internet service. I enjoy telling the young 18 year old college students who come to the door to go pound sand. The kids selling AT&T have no idea how that company held us in a headlock, and basically said “tough crap, we’re the only game in town, deal with it”, but I give them a good education on the subject while they are on my porch.
Screw AT&T.
So true. But the benefits outweigh the "costs", IMO. I'm from Katy, TX, where we could choose our phone and electric provider. That resulted in competition for our $$, meaning more choices for better service. I miss that....
A little ISP is not going to be directly connect to or be part of the Internet backbone, but just hanging on off one of the big boys bgp domains... and get throttled all day long.... a big bridge to nowhere
Not just AT&T. When we lived in Katy (a suburb of Houston), all we had was dial-up, while Houston had DSL and Roadrunner (Time/Warner). The company I worked for was a BIG client for Southwestern Bell (SWB) and I worked almost daily with SWB middle-management people. One SWB guy I knew lived in the sub next to mine and even he didn't know when we would get DSL (they needed to add equipment to the remote terminal near us). Hundreds of homes just waiting for broadband internet and it was almost a year before we finally got DSL in our area. By that time Charter Communications came in with cable TV and cable modem internet. We went with Charter and I told my SWB friend. He said he had got tired of waiting and went with Charter, too. And, he told his bosses about it. Wonder what SWB thought of that?
My small city of 14k in nw Arkansas are considering offering cable tv/Internet. They already are the electrical provider for the city.
I would like to see them do it as an alternative/competitor to the cable company.
Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™ ping.
The one thing I’ve learned in the past five or six years covering this beat and studying the history of human intercommunication is that technology eventually moots all attempts by Central Authority to control it.
See Pope Leo X’s attempt to prevent Martin Luther from distributing his 95 Theses via that newfangled thingy called the printing press.
No proposed net neutrality solution deals with what the ISPs charge consumers. And now from the CEO:
The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending.
He just described the situation in probably 99% of American households, and the need for net neutrality enforcement for the ISPs covering them.
-—————blasts a hole in the arguments of “Net Neutrality” proponents who fear that ISPs will raise prices and limit quality Internet access without government regulation.
No proposed net neutrality solution deals with what the ISPs charge consumers.-——————
The FCC is out there talking about the limits of the internet without government regulation. They want to control the on/off ramps. Their words.
There’s that disconnect of yours again.
————He just described the situation in probably 99% of American households, and the need for net neutrality enforcement for the ISPs covering them.—————
He just described the need for no net neutrality regulations. This is happening anyways, without big government.
This is what happens when marxists keep their hands off - *WE* fix the problem.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.