I have Sonic FTTN 50Mbps service. I've used Sonic over the years and have always enjoyed their service and their mission as a business. I've lapsed a few times because their DSL in some places in SF is just crap, but that's because of AT&T and distance to the closest CO.
Where I'm at now (prob less than a mile from their fiber service, sigh..), when we first moved in, we got Comcast. Of course, the Comcast service was all over the place. Some days 1Mb, some 100Mb (which I never signed up for, but just received), some 45Mb (what I signed up for). As usual, I had man techs come out to try to fix things and of course, none did and all of them had a different excuse as to why things didn't work. So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.
Fed up, I saw I could get Sonic FTTN and it's been rock solid for over a year. It's never gone down and just works - as I would expect. It's too bad we don't have more ISPs like them because if we did, access would be a totally different experience.
As a (very anecdotal) counterpoint, I subscribed to Sonic for a year in an apartment in Mountain View near Latham and Rengstorff with absolutely abysmal results. It's been two years, so the exact details are hazy, but I believe the plan advertised a 20 Mbps down rate. What I received was a connection that tended towards 100 Kbps down and peaked at about 125 Kbps. There were frequent outages - around once a week - for minutes at a time, not to mention a three-week wait for installation (having already paid the sign up fees). Sonic was totally unhelpful in resolving any of these issues and made it extremely difficult to cancel my contract without incurring large fees (despite their deceptive advertising) to the point that I waited until moving out. I will never use them again for anything and actually prefer Comcast.
I don't think Sonic has ever advertised a guaranteed bandwidth for their DSL offering. It's always "up to", which greatly depends on a lot of things with DSL. It's too bad you had such a terrible experience with customer service, I've been with them for almost 10 years and all my experiences have been good.
But in your situation, it sounds like you were likely extremely far from the central office, and probably had lousy indoor wiring as well. 20Mbit/s is basically the "I can see the phone company office from my window" speeds (less than 1000 wire-feet, give or take).
A lot of it has to do with the AT&T copper that they are actually connecting over too. I had their paired DSL offering in Redwood City. One of the lines got something like 10Mb/s, but the other was an abysmal 2Mb/s. It just wasn't worth it to keep the second pair. Sonic was a great company to have as an ISP, but in most areas, they are only as good as the copper they get from AT&T.
Yep this is half my point, line quality is huge in DSL. Sonic (or any other DSL provider) couldn't reasonably give you a guarantee on speeds, even though they know how far you are from the CO (last time I checked they gave you this number when checking availability). I have paired lines and they are also unbalanced (approx 6.5 and 5.5 down), despite assuredly taking the same path from the CO.
My ADSL2+ here in Brisbane Australia runs at 20.1Mb/s -- which is because I live in the literal middle of the "tech area" of this city. Quite spoiled, but as new apartment buildings go up around me, the connection speed starts to struggle as more and more people come online...
I had a similar experience in San Francisco, where they refused to send AT&T out to actually fix the 100 year old copper they were trying to push DSL through. I ended up canceling after never getting more than 1 Mbps.
> So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.
That was my experience with comcast as well. So many friendly people who promised so much and they all delivered nothing. It was maddening. Months after I cancelled, I got a check that returned all my money. I would have preferred internet service given that they were the only provider around, but that was not something their support people could provide.
Where I'm at now (prob less than a mile from their fiber service, sigh..), when we first moved in, we got Comcast. Of course, the Comcast service was all over the place. Some days 1Mb, some 100Mb (which I never signed up for, but just received), some 45Mb (what I signed up for). As usual, I had man techs come out to try to fix things and of course, none did and all of them had a different excuse as to why things didn't work. So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.
Fed up, I saw I could get Sonic FTTN and it's been rock solid for over a year. It's never gone down and just works - as I would expect. It's too bad we don't have more ISPs like them because if we did, access would be a totally different experience.