Dave Farber
2018-07-07 08:30:03 UTC
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Sonic is a small ISP that competes brilliantly with the big guys - so they're trying to throttle its business
Date: July 7, 2018 at 4:58:07 PM GMT+9
[Note: This item comes from reader Randall Head. DLH]
Sonic is a small ISP that competes brilliantly with the big guys â so they're trying to throttle its business
By MICHAEL HILTZIK
Jul 5 2018
<http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-sonic-isp-20180706-story.html>
Dane Jasper says he doesnât think that big telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon are deliberately trying to put his company out of business.
âI think they havenât noticed us,â he said.
Perhaps heâs just being charitable. For years, the big companies have striven to hamstring competition across the telecommunications landscape. And last month, they essentially asked the Federal Communications Commission to finish the job by repealing a rule granting competing phone and internet companies wholesale access to their copper-wire phone infrastructure. The industry petition argues that the rule is an âintrusiveâ regulation that has outlived its usefulness.
Jasper says the opposite is true â that the access to copper, which is guaranteed by a 1996 law, is what has enabled his small regional internet firm and others like it to continue rolling out high-speed broadband services to their customers, in competition with the big firms.
Jasper, 45, is the co-founder and CEO of Sonic, a private Santa Rosa company that provides more than 100,000 customers in about 125 California communities phone and internet service at a flat rate starting at $40 a month. Donât let the low price fool you: Sonic is praised for its customer service, delivers internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit to some customers, and receives top marks for its privacy policies.
As a private firm, Sonic doesnât disclose revenue or earnings. But with steady expansion it now employs nearly 500 people, many of them sharing a bustling workplace with their astonishingly well-behaved dogs in a Santa Rosa office park.
About half of Sonicâs customers receive DSL broadband service over phone lines Sonic rents from AT&T. But the companyâs future rests with the fiber it has been laying, starting with five Northern California cities â San Francisco, Berkeley, Albany, Brentwood, and Sebastopol. In those cities phone and internet service now is available to an estimated 182,000 homes or commercial establishments, with further expansion in the cards.
Sonic and other small ISPs like it owe their business models to an obscure provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The act required the major phone companies to lease their copper wire infrastructure, on which phone service traveled, to competitors at a regulated price.
This allowed hundreds of competitive companies, known as CLECs, for âcompetitive local exchange carriers,â to flourish by offering cheap, innovative phone service and expanding into DSL â that is, phone-line-based broadband access. Some, such as Sonic, have used revenue from their phone and DSL customer base to finance expansion into fiber internet service.
The telecom industryâs petition, which was filed in May via USTelecom, its Washington trade group, would end the leasing rule within 2 1/2 years, cutting off that revenue stream. (The trade group has dozens of members among local and national telecom firms, but its four biggest members are AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Frontier Communications.)
The industryâs argument for dropping the leasing rule is that residential CLECs are an insignificant part of the business now and are shrinking at a rapid clip. âThere is effectively no remaining ⊠competition in that marketplace,â USTelecom said in its filing.
âThatâs flat-out wrong,â Jasper told me. âWeâve got 50,000 California households connected, getting innovative broadband service that in the vast majority of cases is faster than the incumbent offers.â Another 50,000 customers connect through other means, including fiber.
Sonic and other small ISPs have been fighting back in Congress and before the FCC. In a letter to Sens. John Thune, (R-S.D.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, they pointed out that the industryâs petition would stifle fiber deployment, cut off rural communities from the broadband service they provide, and jack up rates. âOur companies build state of the art, Gigabit speed fiber networks,â Jasper and 15 fellow CEOs wrote, âand in many cases, supply the only network access for communities that have been abandoned by incumbent providers.â
In late June, Jasper and his colleagues visited FCC commissioners to argue that competition is not yet nearly robust enough to cut off the CLECs. They got polite hearings from the commissioners or their staffs, but came away with a strong sense of how the deregulatory environment enveloping Washington is oriented toward making the big and rich players bigger and richer.
The big telecom firms are irked at being saddled with a regulation that doesnât apply to their main broadband competitors, cable firms. But this argument only underscores how lack of regulation and competition has left the U.S. with some of the slowest, least reliable and most expensive broadband service in the developed world.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Date: July 7, 2018 at 4:58:07 PM GMT+9
[Note: This item comes from reader Randall Head. DLH]
Sonic is a small ISP that competes brilliantly with the big guys â so they're trying to throttle its business
By MICHAEL HILTZIK
Jul 5 2018
<http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-sonic-isp-20180706-story.html>
Dane Jasper says he doesnât think that big telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon are deliberately trying to put his company out of business.
âI think they havenât noticed us,â he said.
Perhaps heâs just being charitable. For years, the big companies have striven to hamstring competition across the telecommunications landscape. And last month, they essentially asked the Federal Communications Commission to finish the job by repealing a rule granting competing phone and internet companies wholesale access to their copper-wire phone infrastructure. The industry petition argues that the rule is an âintrusiveâ regulation that has outlived its usefulness.
Jasper says the opposite is true â that the access to copper, which is guaranteed by a 1996 law, is what has enabled his small regional internet firm and others like it to continue rolling out high-speed broadband services to their customers, in competition with the big firms.
Jasper, 45, is the co-founder and CEO of Sonic, a private Santa Rosa company that provides more than 100,000 customers in about 125 California communities phone and internet service at a flat rate starting at $40 a month. Donât let the low price fool you: Sonic is praised for its customer service, delivers internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit to some customers, and receives top marks for its privacy policies.
As a private firm, Sonic doesnât disclose revenue or earnings. But with steady expansion it now employs nearly 500 people, many of them sharing a bustling workplace with their astonishingly well-behaved dogs in a Santa Rosa office park.
About half of Sonicâs customers receive DSL broadband service over phone lines Sonic rents from AT&T. But the companyâs future rests with the fiber it has been laying, starting with five Northern California cities â San Francisco, Berkeley, Albany, Brentwood, and Sebastopol. In those cities phone and internet service now is available to an estimated 182,000 homes or commercial establishments, with further expansion in the cards.
Sonic and other small ISPs like it owe their business models to an obscure provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The act required the major phone companies to lease their copper wire infrastructure, on which phone service traveled, to competitors at a regulated price.
This allowed hundreds of competitive companies, known as CLECs, for âcompetitive local exchange carriers,â to flourish by offering cheap, innovative phone service and expanding into DSL â that is, phone-line-based broadband access. Some, such as Sonic, have used revenue from their phone and DSL customer base to finance expansion into fiber internet service.
The telecom industryâs petition, which was filed in May via USTelecom, its Washington trade group, would end the leasing rule within 2 1/2 years, cutting off that revenue stream. (The trade group has dozens of members among local and national telecom firms, but its four biggest members are AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink and Frontier Communications.)
The industryâs argument for dropping the leasing rule is that residential CLECs are an insignificant part of the business now and are shrinking at a rapid clip. âThere is effectively no remaining ⊠competition in that marketplace,â USTelecom said in its filing.
âThatâs flat-out wrong,â Jasper told me. âWeâve got 50,000 California households connected, getting innovative broadband service that in the vast majority of cases is faster than the incumbent offers.â Another 50,000 customers connect through other means, including fiber.
Sonic and other small ISPs have been fighting back in Congress and before the FCC. In a letter to Sens. John Thune, (R-S.D.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, they pointed out that the industryâs petition would stifle fiber deployment, cut off rural communities from the broadband service they provide, and jack up rates. âOur companies build state of the art, Gigabit speed fiber networks,â Jasper and 15 fellow CEOs wrote, âand in many cases, supply the only network access for communities that have been abandoned by incumbent providers.â
In late June, Jasper and his colleagues visited FCC commissioners to argue that competition is not yet nearly robust enough to cut off the CLECs. They got polite hearings from the commissioners or their staffs, but came away with a strong sense of how the deregulatory environment enveloping Washington is oriented toward making the big and rich players bigger and richer.
The big telecom firms are irked at being saddled with a regulation that doesnât apply to their main broadband competitors, cable firms. But this argument only underscores how lack of regulation and competition has left the U.S. with some of the slowest, least reliable and most expensive broadband service in the developed world.
[snip]
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