Sonic increases investment in fiber networks

Santa Rosa-based Sonic has completed its fiber optic build-out in a sprawling office park alongside the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport, a move that signals the company’s continuing expansion into broader telecommunications services as giants like AT&T and Comcast expand their fiber networks in Sonoma County.

Once a small Internet provider that relied on aging copper telephone lines for its dial-up service, Sonic moved into the fiber optic market in 2011, when it deployed residential service in Sebastopol, and diversified into business services in 2013. Today, it has built fiber optic networks in two Santa Rosa business parks and announced projects in Petaluma, San Francisco, Brentwood and at Stanford University.

The company is poised to announce additional fiber projects in the first quarter of this year, including both residential and business-focused services, said Dane Jasper, Sonic’s CEO and co-founder.

The fiber optic network allows Sonic to provide businesses with lightning-fast download speeds of 1 gigabit per second - 167 times faster than its T1 lines, which carry data at ?6 megabits per second - and offer business customers a cloud-based phone service, called hosted PBX.

“For businesses, having more than one or in some locations two choices for their data and telephone technology is a huge win,” Jasper said.

The new fiber optic network runs a total of nine miles, past 250 buildings and an estimated 500 businesses of various sizes in the Airport Business Center, Jasper said.

Sonic competitors AT&T and Comcast also offer broadband Internet and phone service to the area.

AT&T offers several fiber-based services to businesses in the Airport Business Center, as well as network security, online backup and other cloud-based services, spokeswoman Georgia Taylor said. The company also offers packages bundled with its wireless LTE network, touting it as the strongest and most reliable network of its kind in the nation.

“Pricing for our wired and wireless services varies depending on specific needs of our business customers, but customers can benefit from bundling wired and wireless services for discounted pricing,” Taylor wrote in an email.

Comcast has also been “very aggressive” in expanding fiber optic broadband services in Northern California, spokesman Bryan Byrd said. It currently offers fiber optic Internet service at 105 Airport Blvd., on the other side of Highway 101, and has a pending contract for fiber service to American Ag Credit on Concourse Boulevard near the airport business park, he said.

“It’s on the roadmap for 2015,” Byrd said. “We’re taking construction bids to extend fiber into that portion of the Airport Business Center.”

Byrd said Comcast offers Internet speeds up to 10 gigabits per second - both download and upload. Pricing varies, depending on what speed the customer chooses and what type of phone or television bundle they select. It also offers Wide Area Ethernet service in 39 states, enabling businesses to create private networks linking branch offices and data centers.

“That means companies in Santa Rosa like Medtronic, American Ag, and Exchange Bank could use us because we could also service and connect them with their other sites across the U.S.,” Byrd said in an email. “Not every provider is able to service other sites in different states.”

Construction of Sonic’s fiber optic lines at the Airport Business Center ended last month, Jasper said, but the company has been taking pre-orders for the service since mid 2014.

Phone service, too

“Sales have been going really well,” he said. “It will take us until the end of January to get everyone connected who is pre-ordered.”

Jasper said the service, called Gigabit Fiber Internet, will come bundled with cloud phone system, or hosted PBX, which offers complete telecommunications services for the desktop. The service costs $40 a month per employee.

“It replaces their business phone system and the phone lines that go into it, and the usage,” Jasper said.

The new service has nearly cut in half the combined cost of Internet and phone service for Venture Design Services, a technology company that makes equipment for testing cellphone networks. Previously, the Santa Rosa office used four bonded T1 lines which yielded Internet speeds of about 6 megabits per second. For phone service, the company contracted six lines from AT&T for 15 phones.

Terry Haynes, senior software developer at Venture Design Services, said the company had been looking for faster Internet service for some time. The fast fiber service allows several employees to more easily work from home and gives out-of-state employees access to local computers through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, he said.

“It’s a great advantage to us,” Haynes said, adding that Sonic’s voice-over-Internet phone service eliminated the need for the six AT&T lines. “We don’t need those lines anymore,” he said.

Petaluma work begun

Sonic’s first build-out of fiber optic service to a business park was completed last year in a southwest Santa Rosa office park, between Sebastopol Road and Northpoint Parkway. The Corporate Center project included 3.5 miles of fiber optic cables.

Sonic has already begun construction in Petaluma on its next fiber project, which targets a significant section of North McDowell Boulevard. That strip is populated by several business parks and businesses, including the Redwood Business Park to the north and networking technology developer Calix to the south.

New way of selling

With the new fiber service, Jasper said, Sonic is trying to promote a new way of selling Internet service. Historically, he said, the cost of Internet service would be tied to the speed of the service - the faster the service the more you pay.

But that model is inappropriate with fiber, he said.

“The reality is, delivering more doesn’t cost more with fiber optic,” Jasper said. “By tying it to the number of employees, it right-sizes the cost of the product to the number of employees, while every business, large and small, gets full gigabit service.”

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.