Early adopters

Sonic's practices have kept customers happy. Back on Florence Avenue, I spoke to five of them during the week after Christmas. In general, they weren’t “techies,” and they hadn’t upgraded from DSL to fiber because they desperately needed the extra speed. They did it because faster service from a company they liked sounded like a good idea. And the price was right.

Rene Peron, a retiree, complimented the service by calling it "invisible," as in, "No slowdowns, no aggravations."

"So far, they're doing everything right," he said. "I've got nothing but good things to say about them." Having Sonic offer TV service would be even better, he said, and it may happen; the company filed for a video franchise with the California PUC last year.

Meg Jones, unemployed when we spoke, had switched from Comcast. "They're a big business. You sign up for a certain a rate and then they're upping it on you,” she said. “That feels manipulative. Sonic promised that they were not going to do that to me. So far they have not."

Scott Sauer, a horticultural distributor, opted for the $69.95 gigabit plan because it included the second phone line he needs to work from home. The extra speed was unlikely to help him personally, as Sonic made clear upfront. "The installer said you really don't need the gigabit," he noted. Indeed, the Windows XP laptop provided by Sauer’s employer could not get past 600 Mbps at one specialized speed-test site. The default TCP/IP settings ate up too much bandwidth. Routing the connection through an AirPort Extreme slowed it further, to a mere 250 Mbps.

But even speed you can’t use carries intangible benefits. ”It was a kick to tell my IT manager in our home office that I have a faster connection than he does,” Sauer said.

Alternate history

Jasper’s an ebullient fellow. He blogs regularly at Sonic's site, answers customers' e-mails himself, pops up on Twitter and Reddit, and happens to have “LINUX” license plates on his Porsche. After hearing him, you might think any reasonably clueful provider could follow Sonic’s example. “We've sort of accepted in the US that incumbent telecom and cable had won," Jasper said.

In part, this is because the huge incumbents actually improved their service dramatically. Remember Seattle-based Speakeasy Network, an indie provider that quickly became a favorite of technically-demanding residential customers starting in the late '90s? From 1999 to 2010, I subscribed, too; signing up with Speakeasy was an easy call when I had readers filling my inbox with complaints about Verizon DSL.

But Verizon's service stabilized and accelerated; Speakeasy's didn't get any faster. The company did launch an ADSL2+ product before Sonic, but it priced it as a business-only service at $149.95 a month. An acquisition by Best Buy in 2007 completed the company’s pivot away from residential service. From the perspective of its management, that was the right call.

"If we hadn't have gone national, we couldn't have sold the company," said Bruce Chatterley, CEO from 2003 to 2010. "We managed the business for growth and then achieved profitability."

(Worth noting: Chatterley complimented Sonic's fiber-upgrade plans: "It's probably the right strategy for him, and it's sustainable for him in that market for sure.")

Best Buy lived to regret its purchase, however. In 2010, it sold the operation to two other DSL survivors, Covad and Megapath. Most ISPs from the same era couldn't even manage to get bought up by a larger firm.

Felten blamed mismanagement by executives who had come in from the big incumbents and who "never understood that offering the same thing cheaper with a worse cost base could not work."

But questionable business decisions were made even more difficult by the FCC’s change of heart. Reed Hundt, FCC chair from 1993 to 1997, blamed his successors at the Commission for foreclosing real competition in DSL. "Under the Bush Administration, the policy of competition on the monopoly copper platform was repudiated," he told me by e-mail. Sonic “is an exception" but it "wouldn't have been alone" if the older approach to regulated competition had remained in place, he said.

"Inertia is a great explainer of a lot of customer activity," said Blair Levin, a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute who was the FCC's chief of staff under Hundt. "When 90 percent of the customers are already taken, that's a hard business."

Where else?

It’s too late to reverse the effects of that decision—even as Verizon may be calling a halt to its own Fios expansion and AT&T stopping its fiber-to-the-node U-Verse buildout.

But that doesn't leave Sonic as the only active builder of fiber to the home service.

Google finally started deploying its gigabit fiber-optic network in Kansas City—although it has yet to mention rates beyond promising "a competitive price." The Web giant also currently runs a smaller fiber service in Stanford, operated by none other than Sonic.

A few cities, fed up with the current situation, are also getting into the broadband game. In Chattanooga, the local government-owned utility EPB Electric Power already offers gigabit access across the city--though at $349.99 a month, it's not exactly cheap. Its $139.99 cost for 100 Mbps, however, falls well below the $199.95 Comcast charges for 105 Mbps service there. (Farther afield, Cablevision asks $104.95 a month for its 101 Mbps Optimum Online Ultra, while Verizon’s Fios Internet Ultimate goes for at $194.99 while offering 150 Mbps and a phone line.)

But there is one other fiber-to-the-home service that aims to offer the same speeds as Sonic, at an even cheaper price. Vermont Telephone is rolling out gigabit fiber-optic service to homes in 14 lucky telephone exchanges in that state-for only $30 or so. (It took an $81.7 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant to finance that buildout.)

Such moves do put pressure on the incumbents, which have largely responded by having state legislatures pass laws restricting municipal broadband. But they are also isolated examples.

The future might improve, but in the near term, if you want cheap, super-fast broadband your choices are limited: Google, the government, or a real estate agent with property for sale in Sebastopol.

Update: the initial version of this article mistakenly listed the price of Sonic's gigabit service at $79.95; it is actually $69.95.

Rob Pegoraro tries to make sense of computers, consumer electronics, telecom services, the Internet, software and other things that beep or blink through reporting, reviewing, and analysis-from 1999 to 2011 as the Washington Post’s tech columnist, now for a variety of online and print outlets.