Sonic battles AT&T, Comcast to bring fiber-optic cable to California neighborhoods

Six years after entering the fiber-optic internet business, Santa Rosa-based Sonic has reached a level of growth that rivals the blazing speed it touts in its advertisements.

“We would like to ramp up everywhere we can as fast as we can,” said Dane Jasper, co-founder and CEO.

The company nearly doubled the size of its workforce last year, hiring 188 people to bring its total headcount to 418, and now serves 100,000 subscribers across California.

“We finally reached a point where we are at scale,” said Jasper, who started the company in 1994 with Scott Doty while they worked at Santa Rosa Junior College’s computer services department. “With that scale comes more customers, more staff, more financing. … I feel really lucky to be in the position we are in.”

The company has evolved through several different business models over the past two decades.

It started off as a dial-up internet service provider, then morphed into a digital subscriber line provider as the technology improved. It then became a telephone company, placing its equipment in exchanges across California to serve 125 cities.

Fiber-optic internet service is its fourth iteration. Sonic is building out its own fiber network, providing download speeds of 1 gigabit per second — 50 times faster than the average download speed in America, enough bandwidth to bring joy to any Netflix binge watcher.

San Francisco has been the focus of Sonic’s most recent expansion. The city offers a ready subscriber base eager for more competition in a dense urban environment that makes installation much more economical.

Sonic’s efforts, however, are up against a stark reality: The $104 billion industry that provides internet and other telecommunications services through landlines is dominated by a handful of large companies. There are also many infrastructure and regulatory barriers that make it difficult to grow.

In essence, Sonic is waging a David versus Goliath battle. Read More