I live in a place with a municipal telco, and let me tell you, it is night and day. The service is top notch, and it always just works to the point where on the rare occasion that they do have a problem, I spend hours trying to figure out what's wrong with my equipment, because it happens so rarely. It costs more than the local cable company, because the price you pay is actually what it costs to deliver the service, but there are never any wild swings in prices, and when service gets cheaper, you just get upgraded for no additional cost. I wish all companies worked this way.
Yea, Sonic.net is amazing. I definitely recommend them if you are in their service area. Sadly they have been really slow to expand their fiber service, probably because they started in San Francisco, home of the NIMBY.
Ziply Fiber is another ISP that I can wholeheartedly recommend. They have service all over the north west states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho (though still not _everywhere_). Like Sonic.net, their quality of service is excellent. No congestion, very limited downtime, no bandwidth caps. They’ve even posted pictures of the accidents that have caused downtime. Most recently that was damaged battery banks that released enough hydrogen gas to shut down and evacuate a central office. Before that it was a drill that took out a fiber bundle; cue pictures of the engineers splicing all the individual fibers back together.
