On Nov 1, 2020, at 5:32 PM, Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred@gwi.net> wrote:

Sonic builds their own fiber; they are insurgents. This is a good thing and society would be better off with more competition among infrastructure providers. It needs to be funded somehow.

in san francisco, i know sonic was running their own fiber. but i was surprised when in my suburban residential neighborhood sonic started advertising availability to me suspiciously close to when att started aggressively marketing ftth as a substitute for ftt <neighborhood>

You can cheat, but if you are a nonprofit doesn't that kinda go against mission?

well, depends what you think the mission of an arts organization or a library is in these troubled times. that’s why i asked if this is cheating at any level other than that asserted by some vendor’s sales people. (i wtouldn’t want to violate a tariffed offering if only because they would have a legitimate reason to terminate service and some regulator or puc decided on the equities of the pricing.) i’ve never understand the “value of service” pricing (originated by ATT when it was “The Bell System") when it is deliberately decoupled from the cost of providing service. recall that the phone company charged more for touchtone service for decades, even though dialing register holding times were much lower for touchtone than dialpulse, so their costs were in fact lower for touchtone. Ridge Winery (started by engineers) uses tasting glasses which are designated “water glasses” by a famous glass maker. the bowls of the glasses (where the art is) are identical to those of their wine glasses, but the stems are an inch or so shorter. the price is about half. are they cheating? naah. they’re just smart glass hackers.

On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 8:23 PM Mark Seiden <mis@seiden.com <mailto:mis@seiden.com>> wrote: att 1Gb/sec symmetric fiber is about $70/month.

their “business class” service costs >10x that price.

if i don’t want an SLA, does anything keep a non-profit organization from ordering (from att or sonic) residential service at what normally would be considered a business location? sonic seems to overlay on the att fiber network (in parts of the sf bay area)?

(say, for example, you have a caretaker who lives on premises and you terminate the fiber in or near the caretaker’s apartment…)

(would this violate some tariff? could they refuse to install?)

(for me this harkens back to much earlier days where i would order dry copper loops intended for alarm purposes and run data or conditioned audio over them…)

-- Fletcher Kittredge GWI 207-602-1134 www.gwi.net <http://www.gwi.net/>