Sonic Internet review: tariffs, prices and speed in comparison

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Sonic is a rarity among Internet service provider. Unlike your typical ISP, Sonic doesn’t offer a variety of speeds or pricing tiers. Instead, it offers a flat rate of $50 per month, a price that doesn’t increase from year to year. The speed you get for $50? Up to 10,000 Mbps.

Compared to the prices and speeds of the top providers in the country, it is almost impossible to do without it.

For context: The highest level reached by the top Fiber optic provider How AT&T Fiber And Google Fiber is 5,000 Mbps for $245 per month and 8,000 Mbps for $150 per month. Xfinityone of the best Cable provider In the state of California, the maximum is 1,200 Mbit/s for $75 per month.

However, the attractive price of $50 has a catch. To achieve a speed of 10 Gbit/s, you need a Router with the bandwidth capacity. Sonic does not provide this router. For an additional $20 a month, you can lease a router from Sonic, which will bring your monthly bill to around $70, which admittedly is still a pretty good price for such high speeds and still beats the cost-effectiveness of the plans offered by AT&T Fiber and Google Fiber.

Sonic was founded in 1998 and was originally a DSL provider in Santa Rosa, California, before investing in a complete fiber optic network and Fiber optic internetIn 2016, Sonic launched its Gigabit tier for just $50 per month, and in 2021, its 10 Gigabit tier for the same price – making it one of the affordable Fiber optic internet provider in the country, despite its small size.

If you live in California and have access to fiber from Sonic, you won’t find a better deal, even at a total cost of $70 per month. Let’s look at the fine print of Sonic’s internet plan so you know what to expect.

Sonic Internet Plans and Pricing

Source: CNET analysis of provider data

Currently, Sonic only offers one speed because the ISP “doesn’t believe in tiered internet services,” its website says. For $50 a month, you can get Sonic’s Standard Fiber 10 Gigabit plan, which actually averages symmetrical download and upload speeds of 8,700 Mbps.

There is no “cheap” option with Sonic, but $50 a month is the price of many entry-level Internet plans, regardless of connection type. spectrumfor example, advertises speeds of 300 Mbit/s download and 10 Mbit/s upload per month for 50 US dollars; the Price increases by about $30 per year. Sonic reserves the right to increase prices, Broad-spectrum nutritional labelling state that the monthly fee is not an introductory fee and therefore Sonic will not increase its prices every year.

Sonic offers straightforward service terms compared to many other ISPs

Sonic’s terms of service are pretty straightforward: There are no data restrictions And no contractsbut you’ll need to rent a router or bring your own. Additionally, there are no installation fees for new customers and Sonic will pay up to $200 to buy out your contract with another ISP, a nice addition for customers trapped in contracts to get the best price from other ISPs.

Add a landline replacement for just $10 per month

Sonic offers only one bundling option: For an additional $10 per month, you can subscribe to Sonic’s Fusion Fiber 10 Gigabit plan, which gives you the same speeds as the standard 10 Gbps plan but adds Voice over Internet Protocol phone service to replace the landline service.

VoIP can be a cost-effective alternative to a landline in many cases. Sonic doesn’t charge for international calls and allows unlimited calling. Sonic has released an app that allows you to manage this calling feature if you want to add it to your monthly bill.

Make sure you have a budget for a router

Sonic’s $50 monthly fee doesn’t include a router, so if you don’t already have a 10Gbps router, you’ll need to buy or rent one from Sonic. Sonic uses routers from Eero, which start at $5 monthly and go up to $20 monthly, with varying bandwidth potential.

Note that the routers offered by Sonic have different bandwidth potentials depending on whether they are wired with an Ethernet cable or used without one. With Ethernet you can achieve ever higher speedsbut it’s worth noting that you need the right configuration if you want to take advantage of that 10 Gbps speed.

Sonic Routers in comparison

• SonicWiFi6: Capabilities up to 1 Gbps (wired) and 500 Mbps (wireless), bandwidth for more than 75 devices; $5/month.
• SonicWiFi Pro 6E: Capabilities up to 1 Gbps (wired) and 1.6 Gbps (wireless), bandwidth for over 100 devices; $10/month.
• Sonic WiFi 7 Max: Capabilities up to 9.4 Gbps (wired) and 4.3 Gbps (wireless), bandwidth for over 200 devices; $20/month.

For a 10Gbps router, you’ll need to shell out an extra $20 per month, bringing your monthly bill to $70. Plus, you’ll need to use an Ethernet cable to consistently achieve those speeds: a wireless connection to the WiFi 7 Max only reaches about 4.3Gbps.

Where can I get Sonic Internet?

Unfortunately, Sonic is limited to a few metropolitan areas in the state of California, including Santa Rosa, San Francisco and South San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo, and some areas around Berkeley, Brentwood, Concord, and Walnut Creek.

Fiber optic rollout is quite expensive and Sonic used its existing DSL network to lay the foundation for its fiber, albeit at a cost of over $10 million. Still, according to its website, Sonic surpassed 100,000 customers in 2019 and we can only assume the company has been growing steadily since then.

Customer satisfaction: difficult to measure without data

It’s a little harder to see how Sonic’s customer service compares to much larger ISPs because Sonic isn’t large enough to be included in data collections from organizations like JD Power or the American Customer Satisfaction Index. There are a few sources you can check to find out what customers’ general opinion of Sonic’s services is, like Reddit, Better Business Bureau, and ISP Reports. However, you should always take customer reviews with a grain of salt.

According to the Better Business Bureau, Sonic barely gets a 1 out of 5 rating, but only based on a handful of customer reviews about service cancellations and installation issues. Keep in mind that BBB’s ratings for AT&T Internet are 1.1 out of 5 and for Google Fiber, 1.2 out of 5, so the bar isn’t set very high.

In Reddit threads related to Oakland and the Bay Area, Sonic is generally touted as one of the best internet service providers in the region, with some users urging Xfinity or AT&T Fiber customers to switch. ISP Reports’ reviews were also generally positive, giving the provider a 4.33 out of 5. Across all sites, there were mixed reviews on tech support, overall quality of customer service, pricing, and speeds.

Conclusion on Sonic: It’s worth the money

Sonic is worth a try, especially if you’ve paid high prices for gigabit speeds with Xfinity or are looking to invest in a fiber optic connection. Our only caveat with Sonic is that the $50 monthly price doesn’t include a router lease, unlike many other fiber optic providers. You can’t go wrong with a fiber optic connection, and if you have the right router, you can get blazing-fast speeds for a bit more per month.

As Sonic expands its fiber optic network, we hope it also expands its pricing and speed tiers for customers. But if you live in Western California and are looking for affordable fiber optic internet, you can’t go wrong with Sonic.

Frequently Asked Questions about Sonic