Sonic.net

Location	2260 Apollo Way, Santa Rosa, CA 95407
Hours	Tech support: 6:00 am - 11:00 pm Mon - Fri 8:00 am - 10:00pm Sat - Sun Sales and billing: 8:00 am - 5:00 pm Mon - Fri
Phone	(888) 766-4233
Website	http://sonic.net
Established	September 1994

Sonic.net is a mom and pop ISP gone regional. The name is an abbreviation of Sonoma Interconnect. They started out providing cheap internet services to Santa Rosa Junior College students in the early 1990's and just blew up from there. In addition to selling internet access, they're also a reseller of DirecTV satellite television and Verizon Wireless cellular service. Bundles are available.

Their DSL offerings in Davis top out at 6 Mbps down and 768 kbps up. There is no PPPoE and their modems are easily configured to operate in bridge mode. The standard dynamic option provides you a single IPv4 IP address that is subject to change but rarely does. You can also get 8 static IP addresses for a bit more money. Their "Fusion" DSL service offers up to 30 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up through pair-bonded annex M ADSL2+, a service now being offered in Davis through Nevada City-based Spiral Internet, and Shingle Springs-based Cal.net.

Beware of their DSL pricing: The rates on their website are promotional and will go away eventually. It used to be that you had to sign a contract for a year to get those rates, but this is no longer the case. Supposedly you can call up customer service before your rates go up and get the promotional rates extended indefinitely, but I haven't done this yet.

If you're interested in IPv6, they offer IPv6 tunnels to customers, which is much faster than using a third party.

They are a webhosting provider, selling both shared hosting on a cluster and server colocation. DavisWiki and Wiki Spot were collocated in Sonic's Santa Rosa data center for awhile.

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2012-04-13 17:27:54   I switched over to them from Comcast about 2 months ago, and have been pretty happy with their internet service so far. In particular, customer service has been very responsive - their IT guy, Bax, has stayed around after hours to help troubleshoot my connection. Definitely a different experience than dealing with either Comcast or AT&T help.

The internet speed is pretty reasonable, but definitely not close to the 20Mbps potential advertised on the web site. Usually it's fine for streaming videos and such, but every once in a while it gets choppy - though it's much more reliable than the previous Comcast connection. I'm about 7700 feet from the DSL substation (according to their maps), so others that live closer would likely have speedier service. —TrayBiasiolli