It’s always nice to see a small, plucky start-up take on the big guys and not only survive but also prosper. My excellent Santa Rosa based ISP Sonic.net is doing just that – laying its own fiber-to-the-premises network in Sebastopol for only $70 a month and signing up 30% of the local market. While the numbers are still small (the fiber network still only reaches 700 Sebastopol homes), the Sonic.net story is encouraging because it shows that innovation is still possible in the ISP space, a market that has been dramatically “consolidated” since 1995, shrinking from thousands of thousands of local providers in the nineties to just a handful of national carriers today.
So it was a real thrill to have Sonic.net co-founder and CEO come down to our San Francisco studio from his Santa Rosa office to talk about his amazing little company. Sonic.net, Jasper told me, having grown 50% in the last year, is back in “start-up mode” and it’s long term plan is to bring fiber to the district. Fiber, Jasper believes, is the future of home connectivity, especially given the merging of television and the Internet, and our insatiable appetite for video.
Yes, yes, Dane. That’s all very well – but when am I going to get fiber-to-my-kitchen-table in Santa Rosa?