ISP: DSL Extreme, Sonic, ??

Daniel Gimpelevich daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us
Sun Jan 18 19:27:52 PST 2015


The comment about DSLExtreme was from me. They are now part of IKANO
Communications, which partially repurposed their infrastructure to provide
private-label DSL service to any entity that chooses it:
http://www.ikano.com/companies/access
Over the decade that I was a customer of DSLExtreme, which spanned years of
them being based in Canoga Park, then Winnetka, then Chatsworth, they went
from being supportive with issues, about a year and a half later to
changing my static IP without informing me and leaving me wondering why I
had no connectivity but contacting the person they reassigned my original
IP address to (who was out of the country) on my behalf, to replacing their
in-house e-mail servers with Google Apps and imperfectly migrating the
stored mail by automated means but not actually deploying the proper DNS
entries needed for Google Apps until I hounded them into it, to an issue
where there was a short on the wire pair carrying the DSL and causing the
line sync to keep dropping that led to many, many months of back and forth
among myself and different departments of both DSLExtreme and AT&T before
ANYONE became willing to authorize a technician to be sent out who fixed
the problem in just a few minutes. They also completely stopped caring
about the configuration of their DNS servers shortly after that.

Sonic ultimately costs less than U-verse even after the equipment rental
fee for their Pace modem/routers, mandatory for new customers but optional
for those grandfathered in (like me), when you consider that with U-verse
you separately pay for the line and usually a long-distance calling
provider. Sonic has no speed or usage caps, and U-verse has both, with
speed-tiered pricing. If you live in the Sunset, you may be among the first
in the city to get Fiber To The Premises, which goes live on Sonic in
Brentwood next month, and in Sebastopol the following month. They are and
have always been based in Santa Rosa, and that's where they answer all
phone calls, unlike DSLExtreme, which fields all calls to India.
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