Sonic is just as full of shit as Comcast

For about $80 a month, I got a quite bad DSL service (since fiber was not available on Page St, San Francisco…): seemingly random freezes and huge drops in bandwidth, that Sonic Technical Support was never able to provide an explanation for, claiming that “everything is fine on the line, must be your equipment after the router”.

I still stuck with them for about a year, for a number of reasons — one of them being my reluctance to go with Comcast which was the only alternative.

Eventually, I recently (April 2021) moved the contract over to a new place, where I was hoping the service would be better.

It was not.

Sometimes early June, I finally self-diagnosed the problem: whenever you upload anything, download speed will drop abysmally.

Told Sonic technical support about that.

Response: “That’s not a bug. We have documentation about that, and that’s because of network congestion. When you reach your maximum upload speed [ndlr: somewhere below 1MB/s, mind you], you have no download anymore. The solution is for you to throttle the upload speed for every application that uploads something — to around 250kb/s”.

Of course, this sounds like a bad joke. It is not.

At that point, I was still trying to find excuses for them, as I really thought Sonic was a nice company — good people, investment in better infrastructure, commitment to net neutrality — and I was willing to give them a pass on that one, since they actually just resell AT&T.

So, I just wanted to cancel, stay friends and move on to something else — no hard feelings.

When I did pull the plug early July, I was told there is a $170 “early termination fee” — that I should have been aware that moving my contract over to a new address resets the clock (the “early” part), and that I had an opportunity to cancel the service during the first month instead of foolishly giving them a chance to diagnose / fix things.

Here is the take-away: Sonic will sell you absolute garbage when they cannot provide fiber, seemingly just to make a buck. The fact that they are just reselling someone else garbage (AT&T DSL) does not change anything. If you are patient with them, and unwilling to go away immediately, hoping that things will get better, you will get fucked, and they will explain to you that it’s your fault for not paying attention to the fine print, or the fact that they are actually selling garbage.

Good job Sonic. You are just the new Comcast. Except Comcast at least provides a service that somewhat works.