The Fastes Internet on the Westcost for $70

Update 12/14/11
Sonic to bring fiber to SF!
Well to a lucky 2000 customers in the Sunset --hopefully I will be one of the.

“San Francisco is our fastest-growing market for copper delivered Fusion Broadband+Phone service today, so we are very excited to bring our Fiber-optic upgrade process to the city,” said Dane Jasper, CEO & Co-Founder of Sonic.net. “There is a huge demand in San Francisco for higher bandwidth services, and fiber is the only long-term way to meet this demand.”

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9036346.htm

Sonic.net, a local independent Internet Service Provider, is rolling out its new 1Gbps (1000Mbps) fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service, which includes both Internet and phone service for unheard of price of $70 a month. In comparison Comcast's offers a 105Mbps-- the fastest tire they offer,  for a whopping $200-- that's not including the modem fee and phone services. AT&T speeds don't even come close to Sonic.net services in price or speed. they top out at 6Mbps.

I have to be honest, I have been a customer of theirs for about two years, so I might be more excited about this news more than others. I would say that Sonic.net has been by far the best ISP I have ever had.  In the past two years I have seen two different price cuts on my monthly bill. That is unheard of with AT&T or Comcast which jacked up their prices year after year. Plus I get free future upgrade every couple of months like my own fax number, fax to email and email voice mail for free.

The company recently expanded into fiber, having secured the contract to manage Google's own 1Gbps fiber network that will connect 800+ faculty homes at Stanford University. The new fiber-to-the-home deployment is a trial and will reach about 700 homes in Sebastopol when complete. Sonic.net pulls fiber optic cable from their own head office all the way to the customers house.  This eliminates the need to rent space and old copper phone lines from AT&T.

They price their new services the same as their old DSL services. If the pilot in Sebastopol goes well, Sonic.net hopes to expand the service across the Bay Area.

Sonic.net has been around since 1994,  it was founded by Dane Jasper and Scott Doty, both worked on the computer network at Santa Rosa Junior College. After setting up the Junior College's frist internet service, they decided to start their own localized ISP.

They began with dial-up Linux shell access, and then they used conventional phone lines from Pacific Bell and 16.8kbps modems to provide internet access. Fortunately, they were able to avoid the resource problems that plagued many local ISP start ups during the "Internet Boom" and crash of the late 2000's.

In the last year, Sonic began offering bonded DSL service with speeds upwards of 40Mbps--which bundled with phone serves adds up to $70. Keep in mind this is double the curent maximum speed of AT&T DSL.

They accomplish this by renting 2 phone lines from AT&T and installing their own equipment in the phone company central office.  The 2 phone lines are bonded -- making them one circuit. Sonic then uses a DSL standard called ADSL2+, that allows for higher speeds then regular DSL. This gives them the ability to provide higher speeds at a lower price.

Jasper is unlike your typical US Internet CEO; he made clear that his company avoids purely manufactured limits as a way to make more revenue. "I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting."



For more info about Sonic.net click on the video.

SFSU New Ultraslow Network

Have you noticed that recently logging into the SFSU network at school seems to take more than 10 minutes and excessive trials and errors while the network decides whether or not to accept your password or not?  The issues in not limited to one building as I learned on day, after trying to connect to the internet from 4 different lotions on campus. I decided to try and get to the bottom of why the wireless at San Francisco State is so dead slow this year.

 None of the websites run by SFSU mention any current network problems. After some difficult web searches, I found an outdated web page on sfsu.edu stating that in 2010 San Francisco State completed a network-wide upgrade.  The website stated that the upgrade was completed in June 2010 as part of the CSU Infrastructure Terminal Research Project (ITRP). 

The upgrade focused on new Cisco networking equipment to speed up wired network connections to desktop computers campus-wide.  It also involved upgrading the links between buildings and network distribution plans.  The website stated that the transition would be gradually rolled out over the 2010/2011 year to all buildings.  The website did not mention internet connection slowness issues or wireless problems just upgrades to the internal networks.

Ironically, I do remember them installing these ominous looking black boxes around campus last year, but I wasn’t aware of what they were for.  The boxes had fiber-optic cables and cat6 cables -- computer networking cables terminated in them but no other equipment. In addition, I found new wall plates in several class rooms with fiber-optic, cat6 and TV cable connectors.  None of them were live as I tried to use them a couple of times. When I asked sever people in the DAI lab no one knew what they were for. I also noticed that new wireless access points began popping up in many of the classrooms around campus but they were not activated.

In DAI lab Fine Art Building

Fine Arts building

After more research I stumbled upon a website run by the California State University system. The website was for the Network and Technology Alliance. The group is charged with advising the CSU chancellor with tech policy. In 2002 the group came up with standards for computer networks on all CSU campuses.   A review networking systems on all CSU campus revealed that our systems were outdated and didn’t follow the minimum standards of a modern computer network.   The working group came up with a plan that recommended a new round of infrastructure system upgrades and called it ITRP2 – ITRP1 was a similar project in 1994 that funded the first campus wide networks.

The program will cost $17 million to $22million a year for eight years and is in two phases. Phase one was from 2006/07 to 2009/10 and Phase two 2010/11 to 2013/14.  Total cost will between $136 million to $176 million. Details on what the money will be spent on is hard to find as most of the files on the Network and Technology Alliance website are password protected and only the overview for the project is viewable to the public.

Cisco Catalyst Switches like ones to be purchased

 

The good news is the CSU system is trying to modernize and standardize computers systems on the SFSU campus.

The bad news is since we are in the middle of a two phase project there is no telling when or if the network will improve. The issue also points out the lack of information and transparency at SFSU and the CSU system as a whole. They are so disconnected from their users they can’t even tell them why the problems are happing, if there are plans to address their concerns or are even if they are aware that the issue exists.

Current Network unlink in DAI lab and yes if you step on the cable the internet goes out for the whole lab

 The website for the project has not been updated in more than a year, so there is no way to tell how the budget struggle has affected the project. There is also no timeline to show if the project is on time or even if is still ongoing.

The other fact that I found disturbing was in the limited material I could find on the project it had no mention of internet connections at SFSU or any other campus in the system. The outline was focused on internal networks—between buildings and to users, with the ultimate goal to be able to hand additional internal network traffic and more users. Nothing in the report about how the new network would connect to the rest of the outside world,  the internet or what the speed of the internet will be for users. I fear that the CSU system will spend 170 million on a ultra fast network and still have ultra slow internet speeds.

The Box That inspired Steve Jobs

This past week the world lost a great leader and visionary in the tech industry with the passing of Steve Jobs. He and Apple Co Founder Steve Wozniak helped usher in the era of personal computers. Apple would later lead a cultural transformation in music, movies and mobile communications in the digital age. What is lesser known is what inspired the two Steve's to start  Apple, the Blue Box. To understand why a Blue Box was so important to the founding of Apple you need to take a look at the original computer hackers -- the phone phreak.

From the Times obit for Steve Jobs.

"The spark that ignited their partnership was provided by Wozniak’s mother. Mr. Wozniak had graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, when she sent him an article from the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine. The article, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” by Ron Rosenbaum, detailed an underground hobbyist culture of young men known as phone phreaks who were illicitly exploring the nation’s phone system.

Mr. Wozniak shared the article with Mr. Jobs, and the two set out to track down an elusive figure identified in the article as Captain Crunch. The man had taken the name from his discovery that a whistle that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal was tuned to a frequency that made it possible to make free long-distance calls simply by blowing the whistle next to a phone handset.

The term Phreaking was used in the mid 60's to describe people who study, experimented, or explored telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. Back in the early 60's telephone networks were becoming computerized -- the live operators that manually placed calls when you dialed a number were being replaced with automatic computerized switches to complete calls. With the introduction of automatic switches, the general population began, for the first time, to interact with computing power on a large scale. Many individuals interested in computers and technology, were unable to further that interest and therefore turned to the only available option: the computer controlled telephone network.

A large percentage of early phone Phreaks were blind. Joe Engressia, a blind seventeen-year old was skilled with perfect pitch, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C -- a frequency of 2600 Hz--would stop the phone's dial tone. He then founded he could activate phone switches and make calls using different tones. Using this info other people began to develop a rudimentary understanding of how phone networks worked. John Draper a former Air Force electronic technician, discovered through his friendship with Engressia that the free whistles in a Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes could also produced a 2600 Hz tone when blown (providing his nickname, "Captain Crunch").

Draper experimented further and built a a multi-frequency tone generator -- a blue box to gain easier entry into the AT&T system. It functioned by replicating the normal tones used to switch long distance calls and using them to route the user's own call. This bypassed the normal switching mechanism. The most common use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls. 

It took the two Steve's several weeks to find Captain Crunch but after some work they got him to come to the dorms  at UC Berkeley.  Based on information they gleaned from Draper they maded their own blue box "Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs later collaborated on building and selling blue boxes, devices that were widely used for making free—and illegal—phone calls. They raised a total of $6,000 from the effort." On one occasion Wozniak dialed Vatican City and identified himself as Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope, sadly he was sleeping at the time. The next time they attempted to use it they were almost arrested by a police officer passing by the pay phone they were using.   The cop let them go thinking the blue box was a toy.