Installing aerial fiber optic lines for the Sonic.net trial project
Sonic.net has been around since 1994, selling DSL service in California, but it has recently expanded into fiber; the company has even secured the contract to manage Google's own 1Gbps fiber network that will connect 800+ faculty homes at Stanford University.
Sonic.net's new approach to broadband involves stringing its own fiber lines to homes and offering bargain-basement pricing; indeed, the new 1Gbps offering is the same price as the company's earlier bonded 40Mbps DSL offering (in which two phones lines each provide 20Mbps of bandwidth to a home). The price even includes home phone service.
Dane Jasper, Sonic.net's CEO, tells me that the new fiber-to-the-home deployment is a trial and will reach about 700 homes when complete. "Honestly, only as those wrap up will we have a complete picture of the economic model," he says. "But I believe that fast service for a low cost is possible."
If the pilot in Sebastopol, California goes well, Sonic.net hopes to expand the service across the region.
Though the current trial is small-scale, Sonic.net's pricing reminds us just how much room there is in the US Internet market for truly disruptive pricing of the kind that Google has been promising—but on a much larger scale—with its 1Gbps fiber builds in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas.
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