Sonic.net moves into fast lane

Santa Rosa now has its own local telecommunication company. And that's good news for businesses and residents looking for the best prices on high-speed Internet.

Sonic.net has completed a two-year process to become a registered telecommunication company and has started offering blazing fast Internet connections at low prices to businesses within one mile of downtown Santa Rosa.

It marks the latest evolution for the 14-year-old Santa Rosa company, taking it far beyond its roots as an Internet service provider. Now it can offer telephone service, too -- both traditional and digital.

As a telecom, Sonic can put its own equipment in AT&T's central office downtown. It traditionally has relied on AT&T's equipment, piggybacking on the nation's largest telecom.

But now Sonic can offer cutting-edge products at lower prices with its own equipment in the central office on Third Street.

For instance, the company's T1-speed Internet is 30 percent to 55 percent less expensive than similar services by rivals Covad Communications and AT&T, according to local price charts.

Sonic also plans to offer phone service to residents and businesses within one mile of downtown in the coming months, and to expand into other Sonoma County cities and San Francisco within the year.

Prices for residential and phone products have not been announced.

This is the latest transformation for the company, which started offering dial-up Internet in 1994, transitioned to DSL in 1998, and now has 50,000 customers across California.

Sonic elected to become a registered telecom after federal law allowed Comcast, AT&T and other telecoms to shut out small Internet providers from piggybacking on next-generation networks now being deployed.

The Santa Rosa company was faced with the choice of becoming a telecom or being boxed out of the much-faster future of Internet access.

"We've been saving our pennies for years," said Dane Jasper, co-founder and president of Sonic.net. "This is a big piece of the future for us."

Sonic will still buy DSL service in bulk from AT&T and resell it to customers located outside the one-mile radius surrounding the central office. Companies such as Sonic repackage AT&T's DSL with different branding and customer service.

But traditional DSL has a max speed of 6 Mbps (megabits per second). Sonic's new network will offer residents speeds of up to 15 Mbps. Businesses can get symmetrical download and upload speeds up to 30 Mbps.

It can deliver these faster speeds without running expensive fiber optic cables into neighborhoods, relying instead on copper wire it leases from AT&T. The telecom giant is required to lease the copper wire that originates at the central office.

But data transported on copper wires degrades quickly. So Sonic will only be able to deliver its services within one mile of central offices. The company could build large relay hubs in neighborhoods -- but that is an expensive undertaking.

The company spent about $250,000 to become a telecom, Jasper said. To install its equipment in a central office costs Sonic about $50,000 to $100,000 per site. It plans to locate equipment in two Santa Rosa locations, Petaluma, Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Windsor and Forestville.

"Forestville was a surprise to me too," Jasper said. "But our analysis showed a heavy concentration of Sonic customers in that area."

The company then plans to expand into Berkeley, Albany and all nine San Francisco central offices, Jasper said.

Sonic can provide phone and Internet services across all of San Francisco because of the relatively large number of central offices there, he said.

In Santa Rosa, companies are already clamoring for Sonic's less expensive products, said Steve Kerns, president of Norcal Networks.

"The technology and the price is very competitive. And with its customer service, Sonic is top notch," said Kerns, whose Santa Rosa company helps businesses manage their networks and connect to the Internet.

Sonic built its reputation around its customer service. The company does not outsource its customer relations, which are handled by a call center in its offices in Santa Rosa.

Sonic's prices should help Jasper capture much of the market, said Glenn Illian, owner of rival Top Speed Data Communications. His Petaluma company sells Internet services from Covad Communications, AT&T and Sprint. Illian now hopes to partner with Sonic and offer the lower prices to his customers when it comes to Petaluma and other areas.

"Sonic is going to be very competitive at those prices," Illian said.

Sonic's business products range from $129 a month to $1,499 a month, with speeds ranging from a symmetrical T1 speed of 1.5 Mbps to a upper-end ethernet speed of 30 Mbps.

"We can now do it less expensively because we are using our own infrastructure," Jasper said. "We're trying to do something interesting and disruptive."

You can reach Staff Writer Nathan Halverson at 521-5494 or nathan.halverson@press

democrat.com.