How a small ISP delivers ultra-fast broadband when the giants won’t

While Google, Verizon, Comcast and other giant providers struggle to deploy ultra-fast broadband, a small, regional ISP is bringing gigabit fiber service to thousands of homes and small businesses in San Francisco at a surprisingly low price.

The success of Sonic, an independent ISP based in Santa Rosa, California, shows that even a small provider can deliver the latest technology when regulators allow it to compete with its much larger rivals on an even playing field.

But Sonic, and other ISPs could expand even faster if local public works departments would allow them to use modern trenching techniques to bury their cables under city streets.

I had a chance to discuss these issues with Dane Jasper, the CEO and co-founder of Sonic. Consumer Reports ranked his company as the second-best broadband provider in the country, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave it a five-star rating for protecting privacy. And this week, Sonic announced that it is more than doubling its fiber deployment in San Francisco.

To understand the barriers to deployment of ultra-fast broadband, you need to know a bit about how it traverses what the industry calls “the last mile,” which is to say the distance from trunk lines and switches to a customer’s home. There are two ways to bridge that gap: Fiber cables can be strung from telephone poles in the neighborhood, a so-called aerial deployment, or buried in trenches under the street. (A third method, wireless broadband based on 5G mobile technology may arrive in the future, but is still in its infancy.)

Stringing fiber along existing poles should be relatively easy. But in some parts of the country, large telephone companies control access to those poles and make it as difficult as possible for a new competitor to share them. “This is a national issue,” says Jasper.