[HN Gopher] Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K exp...
___________________________________________________________________
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to
hundreds of homes
Author : carride
Score : 919 points
Date : 2022-08-10 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| qwe----3 wrote:
| > over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served
|
| This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
| rvnx wrote:
| To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes
| deelowe wrote:
| I don't understand this sentiment. Taxes are levied to then
| pay for things such as infrastructure which this qualifies
| as. How else should this work?
| rvnx wrote:
| You are a private person and you choose to live deep in the
| country-side / on a desert / on an island / remote location
| / deep in the forest.
|
| Who should pay for your road, your electricity, your water,
| your internet connection when you are the one mostly
| benefiting from it ?
|
| Taxes have to be used primarily with the goal to maximize
| public interest, not the interests of single private
| persons.
|
| Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for
| them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
|
| Could there have been alternatives that maximize coverage ?
| For example, by supporting deployment of 5G antennas as
| public infrastructure (thus, benefiting the whole area).
|
| This family doesn't necessarily _need_ a single fiber cable
| to reach their house.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| 5G base stations have a range on the order of 1000 feet,
| and need to be connected to a high-speed backbone to
| function.
|
| In rural areas, a 1000 foot radius doesn't get you very
| many people, and since you ran fiber all the way to that
| antenna, you might as well run fiber the rest of the way.
| tyen_ wrote:
| That's fair, maybe this family should be able to opt out
| of taxes that don't benefit them then, you know since
| they are so remote and everything.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Rural sprawl significantly increases overall
| infrastructure costs. Their taxes are already being
| subsidized by more urban tax payers. Those rural areas
| can't afford to maintain what they have.
| rvnx wrote:
| Well it's not a stupid idea at all, that when you pay
| taxes, you could vote for the 3 or 4 topics that you want
| support in priority, and they get allocated a more budget
| in proportion or something like that.
|
| This could even increase support of people to pay taxes
| (reducing fraud) as the taxpayers would know they would
| be supporting projects in line with their vision and
| lifestyle.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I get the idea, but this is basically just admitting that
| our representative form of government doesn't work.
| Ostensibly we control our taxes already by who we vote
| for.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| That sounds like it would bring even more political
| divisiveness and injustice to the US.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Yes.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Further, they should be forcibly blocked from using any
| services they refused to pay taxes for. No highways,
| flood protection, low food prices, or access to the
| global trade network for you!
| PythagoRascal wrote:
| Except if they purchase a subscription to these benefits
| through one of the two companies (same parent company)
| that provide them. The subscriptions are of course
| competitively priced, since they only have the best
| interest of their customers at heart.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I find it's helpful to create a monopoly on purpose, and
| then give that monopoly for a service an additional
| monopoly on violence. Then, if someone doesn't want to
| use the monopoly, they can just send men with weapons of
| war to force them to fund the monopoly at gunpoint.
| Bloating wrote:
| Sounds good. Might even bring some accountablity
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Some people are farmers. Everyone benefits if there is
| Internet in remote places in order to help people stay
| and live where the farming is going to happen.
| charcircuit wrote:
| 5G internet is no replacement for wired internet. The
| latency is terrible for use cases like gaming.
| deelowe wrote:
| I thought 5G was in the range of 1-10ms.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You are thinking of 5G mmwave which trades off better
| range for better speed and latency. For maximizing
| coverage you are looking at something that looks like 4G.
| gvb wrote:
| > Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough
| for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family.
|
| Oh the irony... Starlink is also tapping (federal)
| government subsidies to provide internet service to rural
| areas. Tapping government subsidies is a very important
| part of Starlink's plan to become profitable.
|
| Ref: "SpaceX's Starlink wins nearly $900 million in FCC
| subsidies to bring internet to rural areas"
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/07/spacex-starlink-wins-
| nearly-...
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The difference is that those investments will be usable
| by anyone who wants the service and can setup the
| antenna. Where-as a half mile fiber run to your house in
| the boonies can only ever be useful to you.
| welterde wrote:
| The subsidy is for the company though and not this
| specific fiber run, which was a sort of worst-case. The
| company is quite limited in geographical scope, so they
| got a fairly small subsidy, while Starlink is much larger
| in scope and thus got a larger one.
|
| Also that fiber run will remain useful for far longer
| than the Starlink satellites. It's pretty much a one-time
| cost with negligible operating cost, whereas Starlink
| will have to continuously keep launching satellites to
| keep it running.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| One way or another, tax payers spent $30K on a fiber run
| to one house. Yes, they spent less on some other ones
| too. The indirection just increases cost insensitivity.
| welterde wrote:
| It's all about averages though. Some people will be cheap
| to connect, while others will be expensive to connect.
| And the subsidies are most likely written in a way, such
| that the ISPs can't only go for the low-hanging fruit.
|
| Same with Starlink on a bigger scale. Some ground station
| will have more people near them than others (absent
| satellite to satellite comms). Some orbits will be used
| by more people than others..
| gvb wrote:
| ...or not: "FCC denies Starlink's application for $885M
| subsidy" (breaking news)
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/fcc-denies-starlinks-
| appli...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32417587
| treesknees wrote:
| You should look up the area that Jared is building his
| fiber network. These homes are probably 10 minutes from
| the University of Michigan. It's not a remote country-
| side, it's just far enough out of reach of Comcast that
| they won't build out. I understand your point if someone
| decides to build their house on 20 acres of forest, but
| this is not that. That's why we need these programs.
| jeffdn wrote:
| It's pretty widely accepted that the government will help
| people gain and maintain access to infrastructure, even
| (especially?) in rural areas. Ever heard of the Rural
| Electrification Administration[0]? The Tennessee Valley
| Authority[1]? Despite the fact that it is not considered
| a _necessary_ utility de jure, internet access is hugely
| important in our modern society and economy. These areas
| have post offices, electricity, trash service, etc., so
| why shouldn't they also have access to internet? Those
| other utilities cost money to install as well.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I don't understand this comment. There are a lot of
| places in the country where a majority pays for the
| minority when it comes to infrastructure. Case in point
| NYC or Chicago, whose populations and tax bases make up a
| majority of the state, yet their taxes still go to
| maintaining the state infrastructure as a whole. The
| state, in order to function, needs some kind of
| continuity and predictability to plan for population
| dynamics and spread out taxes accordingly.
| cestith wrote:
| Even beyond helping the state as a whole, they are also
| helping themselves. Good luck getting anything into or
| out of Chicago or New York without rail, roads, locks,
| dams, and airports. Infrastructure that connects to
| nothing isn't all that useful. All that downstate
| Illinois roadway, railway, navigable rivers, and smaller
| airports have their uses for Chicago, too. That's what
| networks - like the Internet - do.
| romellem wrote:
| Do you also think the [16th amendment][1] should be
| repealed? Because what you are arguing is basically the
| same as the opponents of that amendment.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to
| _the_Uni...
| [deleted]
| failrate wrote:
| The resources of this country are to be allocated for the
| benefit of its citizens.
|
| In other words, it is our money, and we can spend it on
| decent internet for rural areas.
|
| Lack of internet access is disenfranchising when numerous
| necessary government and school services has been moved
| online.
| Bloating wrote:
| >The resources of this country are to be allocated for the
| benefit of its citizens.
|
| Sounds like a great idea! When can we get started?
| failrate wrote:
| What do you think roads are?
|
| Snark aside, I spent years being angry about every
| government subsidy until I learned that some subsidies
| are pork barrel spending and some are just the normal
| allocations required by a functioning government to
| maintain the expected standard of living.
| toss1 wrote:
| The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as
| infrastructure, defense, education.
|
| One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the
| postal service, which was to provide mail service to
| everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same
| to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some
| house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum
| communications infrastructure.
|
| One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the
| Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical
| service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum
| availability of a critical energy source.
|
| Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which
| required providing telephone service at the same rates to all
| addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures
| that the entire country has a baseline communications
| infrastructure.
|
| This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively
| stripping copper telephone wires from their system and
| replacing everything with fiber or coax -- because the laws
| requiring universal service are tied to phone service and
| copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like
| Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to
| everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
|
| These universal service mandates are not to benefit each
| individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just
| more remote suburbs/exurbs.
|
| They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from
| infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is
| more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate
| and can transport goods.
|
| You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure.
| When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that
| it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own
| petty concerns.
|
| Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to
| do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it
| yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you
| can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report
| back.
| rvnx wrote:
| I'm saying to allocate budget to maximize as much as
| possible the public/global interest.
|
| Yes it's nicer to have optic fiber, but this is somewhat
| luxury if Starlink exists, and if the gov funds it already.
|
| I'm sure some other people in the US need more these 30'000
| USD than optic fiber to watch Netflix with a little less
| buffering.
|
| Budget could be used somewhere else (to build roads, or to
| support medicine/health, education, animal welfare, etc).
|
| So it's not about refusing to help rural / remote people,
| but rather about optimising allocation in order to support
| as much people as possible.
| cestith wrote:
| My parents currently have four options for Internet
| access. One is only on their phones with no tethering.
| The other is to dial in over a landline at 33.6k if they
| can find an ISP that still offers that. There's existing
| satellite, which is 512k down and like 25k up for
| hundreds a month. Or there's a wireless 256k plan that
| costs $2000 to install.
|
| There's no ISDN, no DSL, no Starlink yet, no 5G fixed, no
| 4G fixed, no power-line Internet. They are not watching
| any Netflix, and things like Social Security and Medicare
| are increasingly accessed through poorly performing,
| bloated websites. They paid taxes more than five decades
| of full-time work. There's fiber within two miles of
| them, but nobody's used it to extend what's becoming a
| modern necessity to their house.
|
| If they lived on the other side of the road, they'd have
| the area's rural electric cooperative. Then they could
| get at least 10 Mbps over the power lines. However,
| they're on a corporate power provider that has 4 to 12
| hour outages 3 to 4 times a year besides not offering
| similar additional services.
|
| With the right negotiations and a few hundred thousand
| dollars, their moderately densely populated
| unincorporated area could serve hundreds of homes with
| broadband. The cable and phone companies were given
| millions upon millions of subsidies every month for
| decades now for rural phone and Internet access, but have
| not served this area. It's time something else is done in
| these areas to give them the same access to the modern
| marketplace and to government services as everyone else.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>this is somewhat luxury if Starlink exists
|
| If multiple and more reliable than Starlink existed,
| maybe.
|
| The point of universal access is just that - UNIVERSAL
| access.
|
| We are already failing this massively with laws granting
| territorial monopolies to companies like Comcast AT&T,
| Verizon, etc., enabling them to give the worst possible
| service at globally awful prices. Granting another
| effective monopoly to Starlink is not the solution,
| UNLESS we are going to regulate all of this like a
| utility - actual regulated standards of service, by
| companies with a large in-state business nexus, cost-plus
| rates approved by regulatory body, etc.
|
| Using Starlink seems fine, but Starlink has effectively
| zero skin in the game, no in-state nexux. If it is
| convenient for them to shut off or downgrade service to
| these houses for some reason, there is essentially zero
| recourse for these customers or the state to exercise any
| leverage to cause Starlink to resume service.
|
| This is actually an excellent solution, with a local
| vendor with skin in the game, providing solid fiber
| infrastructure.
|
| You really seem to entirely miss the point of UNIVERSAL
| SERVICE. Yes, the local post office makes a wild profit
| on delivering a $0.60 1-ounce first-class envelope to a
| PO box in the same post office, and loses an insane
| amount delivering the same letter to/from Wherethafakawe,
| Alaska by bush planes. I'm sure they could be more
| efficient scanning the letter and sending an email
| to/from Alaska, but that won't get grandma's fabric
| sample to her grandkid, or my high-performance sample to
| my customer. The point is that the same service level
| everywhere has it's own benefits, and those benefits are
| to the entire nation, not only to some.
|
| With every general solution, you can point out individual
| point inefficiencies. What you are failing to notice is
| that if you optimize for every one of those point
| inefficiencies, you effectively de-scale the system.
|
| You lose ALL the benefits of a consistent system, as well
| as losing most of the economies of scale. This is why
| companies repeatedly go on binges to reduce their supply
| chain vendor count - sure, some of those suppliers are
| lower cost at that point, but the overhead of managing
| many redundant suppliers outweighs the cost.
|
| And you are looking at only one point of the costs,
| getting bent out of shape, and trowing out a generic
| "taxes bad" comment. Yes, it looks like a clueless anti-
| government political comment.
|
| It might even be the case that in some circumstances, a
| Starlink solution could be best. But you have done none
| of the analysis to establish that claim, and other
| people, who are actually 'in the arena' have found a
| different solution is better. If you want to challenge
| them, do so with something better than "ugh, taxes and
| spending bad".
| basilgohar wrote:
| He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise
| wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY
| more money [0] and delivered less.
|
| [0] https://newnetworks.com/bookofbrokenpromises.htm
| [deleted]
| sgerenser wrote:
| Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the
| "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.
| philote wrote:
| Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the
| mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless
| technologies as well. I live in a mountainous area and we
| have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county.
| Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and
| couldn't get fiber.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's way easier to push fiber through the ground in rural
| areas where there's basically nothing than it is in major
| cities where there are tons of things _and already some
| form of wired internet_.
|
| And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last
| mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if
| it's literally rural and that mile is on the property
| owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at
| the road.
| toast0 wrote:
| If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to
| install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's
| about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street
| overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway
| underground 400 feet.
|
| It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably
| going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct
| charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course,
| that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to
| 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway,
| even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the
| pole at the corner of my driveway.
| ericd wrote:
| Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a
| trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go
| yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the
| muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion
| would still be $$$.
| toast0 wrote:
| I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like
| bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not
| much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a
| seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.
|
| I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory,
| I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I
| could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my
| neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they
| wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops
| for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap
| drop for fiber, too)
| ericd wrote:
| Well, you'd probably start by getting Miss Utility to
| come out and mark your lines. I think bombcar's point was
| that you care a lot more about not cutting those than any
| contractor will, and so you're less likely to do it.
| alistairSH wrote:
| A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power
| line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground,
| unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the
| trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire
| in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember
| the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig
| himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company
| to manage it.
|
| Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy
| machinery and can work around other utilities (most
| counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark
| existing services).
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep, depending on the lay of the land doing the grunt
| work can save thousands or tens of thousands - if you
| have the company do it they'll almost certainly bring in
| a crew of 4 or 5 with a underground "hog" machine that's
| supposed to work perfectly but doesn't actually so the
| backhoe appears and then they cut into a buried utility
| line that was marked but backhoes can't read and then you
| wait for the power company to come out and then they
| fight over whose fault it was while the freezer slowly
| drips onto your floor.
|
| Or you can rent a ditch witch and do it yourself and dig
| by hand near anything remotely marked by the marking
| crew.
| ericd wrote:
| lol sounds like this might not just be a hypothetical
| scenario for you.
| inopinatus wrote:
| It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure,
| both last-mile and backbone.
|
| Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of
| building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or
| transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially
| insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two
| means:
|
| 1. Government subsidy, or
|
| 2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to
| recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low
| volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire
| sale, and the _next_ owner gets to offer services for prices
| the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it
| merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
|
| It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across
| your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each
| end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
|
| There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during
| M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
| Vaslo wrote:
| Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local
| library for everyone to use. I'm very supportive of rural
| people and the life they choose to live, but you are right -
| they should understand the drawbacks.
| burntsushi wrote:
| It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles
| of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would _only_ be $30K
| for that.
|
| I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches
| dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles
| would come out to a lot more than $30K.
| strken wrote:
| What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you
| could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks
| straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing
| with obstacles is hard.
| burntsushi wrote:
| I don't know. I didn't do it. I just know how much money
| came out of my wallet and how long the trench was. :-)
|
| So that means I paid for labor. But presumably some part of
| that $30K will be going to labor as well.
|
| Another possibility is that when you get to the scale of
| 0.5 miles, you start using different tactics or machines
| than the small little backhoe loader that the guy used in
| our yard. So, more capital required but overall more
| efficient.
|
| Anyway, I don't mean to try and offer an accurate
| accounting of all of this. I mostly just meant to provide a
| counter-expectation.
| dboreham wrote:
| There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to
| dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal
| boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost
| though.
|
| e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel
| my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump
| trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment
| depreciation).
| brianwawok wrote:
| You get bigger machines, which do work faster.
| fragmede wrote:
| And you dig smaller trenches with them. Microtrenching digs
| a foot deep and two inch wide hole for direct bury fiber
| cable, saving time and money over older techniques.
| niffydroid wrote:
| Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few
| trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to
| dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility
| companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility
| through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a
| neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to
| do this.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| .....have you ever dug fiber in Michigan?
| omvtam wrote:
| You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like
| electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric
| company.
| dboreham wrote:
| In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on
| utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an
| open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up
| there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There
| are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have
| assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into
| a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high
| tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff,
| for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who
| does the same work for Comcast.
| adrr wrote:
| Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had
| to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where
| there aren't large pools of money from the government to get
| people decent Internet address.
| fourthark wrote:
| At $55/mo, he'll start making a profit in 45 years.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| From the article: he had $2.6MM in help from the "American
| Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery
| Funds".
|
| He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to
| homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| That bill and these types of projects are basically why we
| have 10% inflation now.
| lambdas wrote:
| Damn, this project is even hurting me in the UK then
| because we're also at 10%. Curse you Jared.
| Tostino wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure this is the exact US "government waste"
| driving the global inflation right now.
| cgeier wrote:
| How does spending a lot of government money make goods
| and service more expensive?
|
| EDIT: At least here in Western Europe, we mostly have a
| supply side inflation, because energy got a lot more
| expensive, not because the government has been "printing"
| a lot of money. I suspect it's the same in the US.
| h1fra wrote:
| Actually Europe has been printing a lot of money by
| having less than 0% interest rate for loan. Current
| inflation is due to many factor, some estimate it has
| been slowly growing since 2008, plus covid where we
| printed money to just to keep business alive, plus
| negative interest rate that allowed countries to loan too
| much, etc...
|
| But I suspect that subsidies for infrastructure is one of
| the least impactful factor for inflation.
| failrate wrote:
| It does not unless that money is spent competing with
| businesses and citizens for resources. However, in this
| case the money had already been earmarked for rural
| internet service and is not being used to purchase goods
| and services that citizens would be buying instead.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Yes, inflation is currently a world-wide issue, and
| explanations at the world level lead somewhat obviously
| to the pandemic and Russia's invasion of the Ukraine.
|
| But here in the USA, people like to believe it must be
| political and local, completely unrelated to the totally-
| coincidental worldwide issue that happens to be very
| similar.
| Bloating wrote:
| >But, here in the USA people like to believe it must be
| political...
|
| Cool, whats your prognoses for effectiveness of the
| Reduce Inflation Act
| pwinnski wrote:
| I'm in favor of the bill, but the name is stupid, even
| misleading. The spending is largely good, but it won't
| have much effect on inflation, if any.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Inflation isn't at 10% but it seems like investing in
| infrastructure is a good idea. If we needed to pinch
| pennies we could start at the bloated military budget
| _wolfie_ wrote:
| Right, in the middle of war with Russia and with war with
| China on the horizon. Great idea.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| The US aren't at war with Russia.
|
| Sure, they're helping an ally in a De facto war against
| Russia, but currently the us spends more on "defense"
| than both Russia and China combined, when it is
| technically at peace. In case of a war with China, are
| you expecting the military budget to not increase at all?
| Thetawaves wrote:
| How do you stay at peace? A strong deterrence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The US has the strongest deterrence in the history of the
| world, and it's constantly at war.
| vaidhy wrote:
| When is the time US has not been at war? Maybe, we are
| inverting cause and effect here.. US is always at war
| because the budget allows for it?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Say it this way. Tomorrow if the american security
| /defence budget was cut to 0, do you think the rest of
| the world will storm/attack Americans because they have
| an eternal blood thirst for them? Don't they have their
| own problems to deal with?
|
| This is the problem with mitary and security infra of any
| country. They keep the bogeyman alive because their
| paychecks depend on it.
| Thetawaves wrote:
| This is literally exactly what would happen. It need not
| be blood thirst motivation; simple profit dynamics are
| enough to ensure this outcome.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Wars we've provoked/are provoking but that's not a
| discussion relevant to the original submission
| kombucha13 wrote:
| That doesn't make any sense.
| Bloating wrote:
| Gotta pay your fair share, so it can be granted out for
| someone elses gain
| beeboop wrote:
| Are you also concerned about your tax dollars paying for
| roads in the next neighborhood over?
| Bloating wrote:
| The neighborhood developer paid for that. The roads
| connecting, donated many many years ago by the landowners
| at that time
| bell-cot wrote:
| Ah! - so the next neighborhood over has all-private
| roads, and the homeowners association there ( _not_ the
| government) pays for all snow plowing, crack & pothole
| patching, repaving, storm sewer work, etc. that might be
| needed?
| sophacles wrote:
| Ah yes, the HOA. A group of elected people that can
| compel you to do things with your property, require you
| to pay a share every year or they take your home, and
| have the ability to fine you if you don't comply with the
| majority opinion. Very much not a government in any way!
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I get the point you're making, but to the facts, that is
| quite literally how many subdivisions work, and least in
| the western US.
| bell-cot wrote:
| In my corner of Michigan, there seems to be a very clear
| dichotomy on this:
|
| - Private developer builds a sprawling subdivision with
| plenty of nice wide roads and lots. (So a very large area
| of pavement per tax-paying property.) And turns the whole
| thing over to the city/village/township, to be their
| public road budget black hole forever more.
|
| - Private developer builds a _very_ compact little
| development, with houses (or condo 's) packed in like
| sardines along a rather narrow and minimalist Private
| Road.
| amazingman wrote:
| Good thing roads are permanently in working condition!
| mmastrac wrote:
| This is literally how societies function - you contribute
| a small amount to the general pool, you use small amounts
| from the general pool. In some cases bigger chunks go for
| bigger works like ISPs or bridges. I certainly hope you
| don't want a world where every road, bridge and traffic
| light is independently owned.
| DavidAdams wrote:
| Yeah, wait until you find out that some of your tax
| dollars go to pay for bridges you never use or to bomb
| people who never personally insulted you.
| Bloating wrote:
| Well, there is a lot of legal graft in society
| westpfelia wrote:
| Dont drive on roads I guess? Would hate to be apart of
| graft.
| gowld wrote:
| amazingman wrote:
| What exactly are you advocating as an alternative?
| Leaving the unserved homes unserved?
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| This is also why USPS is crucial for rural areas. The
| Government should be subsidizing this work because if
| they don't people in rural areas are left behind.
| xavxav wrote:
| Today you help finance someone's fiber, tomorrow they
| help finance your hospital/fire dept/etc, that's the
| whole idea of public works.
| Bloating wrote:
| Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain
| works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital,
| fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning
| off "their fair share"
| thelamest wrote:
| Coordination games and public goods games (which arguably
| model insurance) work best when people don't adversely
| self-select, but coordinate around the social optimum
| (for insurance, when the risk pool is as large as
| possible). Whatever can orchestrate such coordination
| adds value. If people do it on their own, great, but some
| problems have characteristics like time horizons such
| that the coordination doesn't happen without an
| authority. Yes, this brings in other public choice
| problems, but the trade-off is not necessarily bad.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire
| depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off
| "their fair share"_
|
| This has already been tried. People used to subscribe to
| fire service, or ambulance service. It doesn't work, and
| is also bad for society.
|
| If you want people to only use the things they directly
| pay for, and not pay for shared things through taxes,
| then only drive on your own driveway. Don't drive on any
| roads outside of your cul-de-sac. Don't get your Amazon
| order delivered on state and federally-funded highways.
| Don't fly out of any big airport in America. Don't fly on
| any commercial airline, since they have all received
| taxpayer bailouts in the past. Don't use a bank. Don't
| use money. Hire a security guard to protect your
| property, and another one to follow you around every day.
| Get your water from a well on your own property.
|
| For an 88-day-old account to be this stunningly obtuse,
| I'm going with "troll," rather than "genuinely completely
| oblivious to how the world works."
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > People used to subscribe to fire service, or ambulance
| service. It doesn't work, and is also bad for society.
|
| That's interesting - FEMA says that 70% of the fire
| departments in the US are all-volunteer, and >90% have a
| volunteer component.
|
| https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/registry/summary#g
|
| I've lived in areas with volunteer fire departments that
| paid for their operations primarily with "fire dues" for
| most of my life. As far as I know, _most_ volunteer
| departments operate like that.
|
| I had no idea they didn't work. I wonder if anyone has
| told them?
| thfuran wrote:
| What does account age have to do with any of this?
| amazingman wrote:
| In this case the "middle man" is literally doing the
| work. Money doesn't build things. It goes to entities so
| that they can build things. I suspect you know this, but
| it _seems_ like you don't.
| pentae wrote:
| So if you want to see this theory in action go to
| developing countries with an elite ruling class where
| they don't disperse funds to social works and see how
| nice it is, behold their lame GDP, etc.
|
| The country I live in SE Asia is a good example. It's
| quite libertarian out here and yeah being able to pay for
| private hospitals is nice, but generally speaking your
| quality of life is lower, quality of goods is lower,
| average person is less educated, traffic is a crippling
| problem due to poor planning, it goes on and on. And
| despite labor being super cheap, roads are a mess,
| sidewalks are few and far between and if you do get one
| it's crowded with junk.. Only 10% of the country pays
| taxes, the inequality with the rich is massive, and if
| you're not in the top 1% you're basically a poor.
|
| I recommend everyone in a rich english speaking country
| spending at least a year or two living in a developing
| country to get some perspective
| bodfinch wrote:
| Same sentiment here. Maybe he could look into some WAN to CPE
| connections from the fibre terminations
| jtap wrote:
| He presented at an online nanog event. You can watch it here
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo I did enjoy
| listening.
| kloch wrote:
| Jared has been participating in Nanog since forever. I have
| always looked up to him as a top-tier engineer.
| slim wrote:
| is he visually impaired? I'm asking because he's presenting
| using slides including pictures
| brentm wrote:
| This seems like a fun project to work on but what is the
| financial game here? Does he invest in building the network,
| operate at a loss and then sell to someone like Comcast? I assume
| building a remote fiber network that can reach 600 houses has to
| incur huge CapEx (way more than $2.6M right?) and at $50/mo a
| very long payback period.
|
| However it works, pretty awesome project, kudos.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If I were really rich, I would spend a gigantic amount of money
| for the sole purpose of fucking over Comcast.
| antonymy wrote:
| Amen.
| dominotw wrote:
| Its a misleading title. Govt 'built ISP', this guy led the
| effort.
| treesknees wrote:
| No you are incorrect. If you read the article and the
| original article they did in Jan 2021, the original effort
| was completely funded by him and his neighbors (as in they'd
| pay $X that will cover future monthly bills later.) This
| article is about how he has obtained additional government
| funding to supplement the efforts he was already doing on his
| own.
| dominotw wrote:
| but i was responding to this
|
| > fiber network that can reach 600 houses
|
| GP wasn't asking about 'original effort' .
|
| Title mentions 'hundreds of homes'
| wollsmoth wrote:
| looks like he's been able to find some deals on equipment and
| stuff since he operates on such a small scale. I guess he can
| just continue as a small business indefinitely if he gets
| enough cash flow.
| failrate wrote:
| It is government subsidized. He just wanted good internet in
| the area.
| criddell wrote:
| Is there any internet in the US that isn't subsidized?
| pwinnski wrote:
| The initial investment is paid by subscribers or financed by
| the government grant, both mentioned in the linked article.
|
| The monthly income of $55 or $79 times 70 people is
| $3850-5530/month gross right now, which is likely not a full-
| time income, but with potentially 600 more customers soon, it's
| possible he could achieve a full-time income for himself, which
| many people would consider a worthy goal.
|
| In 1994 or 1995, I used an ISP in Sioux Falls, South Dakota,
| that was just one guy providing decent service. If there were
| issues, I'd call David and he'd fix them. His goal was to have
| good internet service--which was difficult to come by then and
| there--and to underwrite it by sharing it with others. I know
| he made a go of it for a number of years, although I'm not sure
| how it ended.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| People in tech tend to forget that proper tech doesn't actually
| need 100s of engineers to keep it operational. That's the whole
| point of a computer. It does what you programmed it to do, and
| it does so automatically.
| tryptophan wrote:
| Crazy idea, but why can't we just buy some armored cable and let
| it lie on the ground? People can bury it themselves if it really
| bothers them.
|
| A lot of these people dont seem rich enough to justify caring
| about it being pretty...
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Traditionally the solution is to have a tiny outbuilding with
| your electric meter, water valve (if you're on town water) and
| landline connection and then let the homeowner deal with the
| bulk of the length of the line run.
|
| Getting electrical and water in those situations is always a
| town by town crap shoot because the trades are constantly
| lobbying to disallow it because they want more work. I assume
| ISPs are the same way.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| I think it's acceptable to expect better. If we didn't, we'd
| probably have surface level sewer, water, fiber, cable, etc;
| all laying about, probably causing trip hazards. And these
| industries would probably lobby and set archaic and asinine
| rules for how the burial happens, and make you pay 10x the cost
| of what it really takes to use one of their approved
| contractors, because you're indulging in the luxury of having
| hidden basic-needs infrastructure.
| dboreham wrote:
| There are many reasons why this isn't done and isn't a good
| idea. One of them is: animals will eat the cable. Another is:
| people will trip over the cable. Another is: eventually someone
| will dig the cable up with an excavator, even if the operator
| of the excavator is the same person who carefully laid the
| cable a few years earlier. I don't explain how I know that...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040
|
| Slides from Jared's talk:
| https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayO...
| basedgod wrote:
| great another example of abusing public taxpayer dollars to
| subsidize rural homes that shouldnt exist
|
| infrastructure outside of dense towns is unsustainable with the
| extremely low amount in taxes rural areas pay
|
| these people do not deserve the same standard of living as those
| in sustainable areas
|
| subsidize them to move to urban areas, not their lifestyle that
| uses 20x the infrastructure load an urbanite does
|
| Amerika can't keep building out the same levels of roads
| utilities and municipal water to rural areas as it does to
| cities. this standard of living does not scale. it is not
| sustainable.
|
| if you don't believe me, go look at 100 year infrastructure costs
| once a suburb needs replacing. this is why every town in America
| is failing
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Why is the article harping so hard on the whole "government
| grants" bit. Where the investment is coming from is just about
| the least interesting bit of this story.
| jleahy wrote:
| My wife did this, about 6 months of digging up roads in central
| London. Would recommend. AMA.
| tinfever wrote:
| How did you meet your wife with an ASN? Asking for a friend...
| jleahy wrote:
| We were interns (software engineers) at Deutsche Bank, and
| unfortunately she didn't have an ASN back then.
|
| Also some bias shows here - surely the question should be
| 'how did you meet your wife with multiple 3 ton excavators'.
| KingFelix wrote:
| How long did it take to complete? Central London seems like
| high density, how many users do you have? Can you share
| website, I can forward to some central London folks!
| jleahy wrote:
| Less than 12 months from incorporating a company to go live,
| about 6 months of that was road works.
|
| Low hundreds of homes (so low probability that you know
| anyone there, and if you do they have already heard about
| it).
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/hampstead-fibre
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| What kind of research did you do to achieve this? Any workshops
| or did you talk to other ISPs to gain knowledge?
| moritonal wrote:
| As a fellow Londerer please please expand on this. Like, why,
| what were the returns, what'd you peer into?
| jleahy wrote:
| Why - 30mbps download and 0.5mbps upload, it was really the
| upload that was crippling (think video conferencing)
|
| What were the returns - time will tell, but I probably have
| the best internet in London
|
| What do we peer into - 10Gbps of NTT, two more 1 Gbps full
| peering sessions, plus the LONAP internet exchange to pick up
| Google, Netflix, etc. Plus my wife (AS210412) peers with me
| (AS211289) of course.
| contingencies wrote:
| Remember the Hacker Manifesto: _What could be dirt-cheap if it
| wasn 't run by profiteering gluttons_.
|
| The physical infrastructure of cable is not expensive. The fiber
| itself costs nothing in bulk. Currently a pair of 1Gbps 20km
| rated transceivers costs <USD$20 in bulk.
|
| The only things that make installs expensive are: (1) regulation;
| in particular ingrained antiquated systems of land ownership and
| associated regulatory capture bullshit by established monopolies;
| (2) switching infrastructure and associated power, land and
| security requirements; and (3) one-time installation process
| costs such as trench digging, termination box installation and
| cable termination.
|
| Once installed, the cables are unlikely to fail unless
| aggressively attacked with digging equipment.
| markandrewj wrote:
| There is a good interview on YouTube with Jared Mauch. I think it
| may have already been posted on Hacker News previously, but I
| have included the link below for anyone interested.
|
| https://youtu.be/ASXJgvy3mEg
| ncmncm wrote:
| I don't understand why he doesn't use a microwave link for some
| of the single-endpoint long runs. (I don't doubt there was a
| reason; just want to know it,)
| vlunkr wrote:
| Anyone else amused by the title? To me it reads as "Man [...]
| expands to hundreds of homes."
| d23 wrote:
| I suppose that's impressive too!
| tikiman163 wrote:
| I find it a little weird and off putting that thierprivate
| business is having its expansion funded by state funds for
| coronavirus recovery. I get that this is generally a good thing,
| and many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, receive government
| funds for developing and maintaining infrastructure. However, why
| is the Coronavirus recovery fund paying for this?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| In this specific case there is an easy answer (mentioned in the
| article): Access to reasonably priced broadband internet was
| seen as one of the biggest, most easily addressable (with
| targeted government infrastructure funding) dividing lines
| between people that were able to easily work from home and
| those that experienced larger hardships during the height of
| the pandemic.
| [deleted]
| atentaten wrote:
| Is he connecting to a backbone or to another ISP?
| woah wrote:
| The "backbone" is made up of other ISPs
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| That's right, a backbone is made up of ISPs: individual spine
| pieces, or vertebrae.
| wdb wrote:
| Maybe I should consider doing the same for the Mews houses in
| Westminster :)
| guywithahat wrote:
| Isn't this just called starting a business? Don't get me wrong
| it's very cool but this just seems like the thing people should
| do when there isn't enough competition in the market
| treesknees wrote:
| He did start an LLC but it's not a business in the sense that
| he's hiring a corporate structure around it or kicking up VC
| funding, or even trying to make a profit. It's admirable
| because how many other ISPs can you point to with this model? I
| can't think of any.
| gowld wrote:
| fragmede wrote:
| Most small local ISPs are like this, a labor of love, not
| something who's singular purpose is to make the owners
| unimaginably rich. Cruzio, in Santa Cruz, and MonkeyBrainz in
| San Francisco come to mind.
| shakezula wrote:
| Sure, at face value you're right about that, but I think the
| main difference is a lot of people don't get annoyed at , for
| example, Ford's customer service and turn around and start an
| auto manufacturer, and for most non-technical people I think
| they'd consider the two nearly equal in terms of feasibility
| and effort.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Not only that, but he's providing a much higher level of
| service for a significantly smaller cost than ISPs that have
| been given billions over several decades and have yet to
| reach the customers he's reaching.
|
| My biggest fear for him is that comcast will lobby to be able
| to sell subscriptions on his infrastructure (because
| competition!), put him out of business and then screw his
| existing subscribers.
|
| edit: s/provoking/providing (autocorrect)
| theptip wrote:
| Exactly. It's noteworthy because it underscores just how
| uncompetitive the ISPs in the US are. That a small shop can
| completely eviscerate them on quality and price shows that
| they just aren't trying. (Look at ISPs in any developed
| country and our networks are embarrassing in comparison.)
|
| It's frustrating because the playbook for how to improve
| this is very clear; local loop unbundling on telephone
| lines, allow municipalities to offer broadband in
| underserved areas, and mandate sharing of poles etc. to
| make it easier for new entrants to compete. Of course when
| you can't innovate, legislate; the ISPs lobby hard to
| prevent all of this consumer-centric stuff from happening.
| bluedino wrote:
| > Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its
| cable network to his house--and that he would have gone with
| Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
|
| Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.
|
| You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union
| workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas,
| sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess
| up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems
| after storms.
|
| And people want this all for $55/month!
| mschuster91 wrote:
| As someone who actually was working in excavation for
| internet... well, some points to unpack here:
|
| - _You_ don 't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP,
| you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can
| spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or
| two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty
| years.
|
| - Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas
| - you have the central map register of the district which shows
| exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually
| it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge
| POTS cable. Sewers _in most cases_ aren 't much of a concern as
| they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm
| below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In
| rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole
| through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following
| tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.
|
| - That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can
| last literally for _decades_. POTS cable in many cases is over
| fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered
| in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well
| over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a
| connection is 33.000$.
|
| - Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is
| an extremely net-positive _investment_. Assume a small village
| of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small
| company moves into some farmer 's shed because the rent is
| cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and
| employment taxes.
| cestith wrote:
| In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have
| their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although
| it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power
| and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas
| brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water
| mains.
| dboreham wrote:
| I live in one of those rural homes. We only get electricity
| (and natural gas too, but that's unusual around here)
| brought in. Water and sewer are on-site. Phone is VoIP.
| Internet is wireless (via an ISP I built). Rural piped
| water is very rare here.
| criddell wrote:
| Lots of rural folks rely on well water.
| cestith wrote:
| True. Many of the places that are low-hanging fruit for
| rural Internet access do not, but it's a mix. Many of
| these places that the comments are dismissing as
| irredeemably remote are along secondary highways less
| than five miles from a city limit. Lots of those places
| have water mains, but certainly there are places with
| private wells.
| dkhenry wrote:
| Its so expensive that Comcast only made a profit of 42 Billion
| in 2021, while providing a lower quality of service than what a
| small ISP in Michigan can give you for a one time 2M in
| government grants.
| bluedino wrote:
| The little guy in Michigan also doesn't own the NBC
| broadcasting network, theme parks... Comcast didn't make $42B
| off it's cable subscribers.
| dkhenry wrote:
| You should check their quarterly earnings I think you would
| be shocked. In the second quarter Cable and Broadband
| account for 7.4 Billion in profit, and have a profit margin
| near 50%. NBC Universal only accounts for 1.9 Billion and
| their theme parks are 632 Million. By far cable is the
| largest driver of profit.
|
| https://www.cmcsa.com/news-releases/news-release-
| details/com...
| dr-detroit wrote:
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The correct price in cities is $10 a month. The correct price
| in rural areas is $500 a month plus. But we have to average
| them because we insist on taxing cities to subsidise rural
| lifestyles...
| thehappypm wrote:
| Us vs them is not cool. Every lifestyle has value.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| That's fine, as long as you will pay the same sums to
| support whatever weird lifestyle choices I make...
| charcircuit wrote:
| If I could get at actual good speed instead of being limited
| to 6/1 I would have no issue paying $500. I get a ton of
| value from the internet.
| tristor wrote:
| The funny thing is I'd be totally okay paying $500/mo for
| good Internet service outside the city. The problem with this
| is that even in the city where Comcast has it's headquarters
| they will lie to you and then not show up at the agreed upon
| time scheduled 3 months in advance /and paid for/, then try
| to blame you for it and take no accountability. Which is
| exactly what Comcast did when I tried to get connected in my
| move last month. So, sure, organizations have Product teams
| that focus on pricing strategy, and part of that is
| amortizing capital costs to serve those customers and also
| averaging out the per-customer cost of service, but a bigger
| issue is that Comcast is just really bad at doing it's
| supposed job.
|
| I wish there was a rural fiber or muni fiber project near me
| that I could subscribe to, and I'd happily pay 3x-4x what I
| pay Comcast, if I had some assurance that the person on the
| other end of the phone would actually keep their commitments
| and know what they are doing.
| bombcar wrote:
| The corn has to be grown somewhere.
| galdosdi wrote:
| And it doesn't take very many people to do it.
| Bloating wrote:
| with taxpayer subsidies, to put in our gasoline
| criddell wrote:
| > Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do
| it.
|
| There are two homes that are a half mile away from the others.
| The $30k number relates to those two properties.
| the_optimist wrote:
| Average cost of ~ $40k per connection to the government. How is
| this better than Starlink?
| bell-cot wrote:
| The area served is close to Ann Arbor, MI - so remember
| Starlink's "satellites are in random-ish orbits around the
| Earth, not magically hovering over areas with more potential
| customers" issue.
|
| It's possible that the county is trying to get tough with
| Comcast here - "stop gouging our residents so badly, or we'll
| help a local competitor (to you) grow into a real thorn in your
| bottom line". Starlink isn't credible for that.
|
| And the money is from a "State and Local Fiscal Recovery" fund
| that the county has access to - so spending it on Starlink
| would probably be a legal non-starter regardless.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I greatly respect the initiative and scrappy-ness of someone
| doing this. And the legacy providers are clearly sitting on their
| monopoly position in a way that makes their pathetic alternative
| so starkly unattractive.
|
| But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a
| certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he
| will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do
| this cheaply?
|
| Namely:
|
| -- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
|
| -- customers who need 24 hour customer service
|
| -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ
| people
|
| -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or
| other simply nuisance lawsuits
|
| -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or
| when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
|
| -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of
| (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the
| original subscriber price
|
| Maybe none of this rises to the level of making it fundamentally
| different or unsustainable? But it seems to me the honeymoon
| phase doesn't last long, and it's got to hit some unavoidable
| realities soon. At least, if you think you can replicate this, it
| requires finding people and neighbors who are willing to do
| actual work and investment/concern to make something like this
| possible, and not simply pay a vendor a premium to phone it in.
| It must be treated like a neighbor-to-neighbor community project,
| not a faceless commercial transaction with its attendant
| obligations.
| kalleboo wrote:
| There are lots of ISPs that don't suck
| samstave wrote:
| FblQ00Ho
|
| That was my first ISP password assigned to me from San Jose
| based ix.netcom.com (Also the city I was grounded a month for
| running a $926 long distance bill calling into BBSs to play
| trade wars and the pit)
|
| But the best ISP I ever had was a 56K dial-up in Seattle. To
| play Diablo.
|
| I am looking to build an ISP.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| It's like setting up a giant LAN party, but for grown-ups,
| doing serious grown-up stuff.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > -- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
|
| Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer
| your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or
| not do business with whoever they want, provided they're not
| refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or
| federal law.
|
| > -- customers who need 24 hour customer service
|
| Also easy. You are under no obligation to meet peoples
| unrealistic demands or needs.
|
| > -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to
| employ people
|
| He already is familiar with third party contracting.
|
| > -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract,
| or other simply nuisance lawsuits
|
| Frivolous lawsuits are a risk in any business in America.
|
| > -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement,
| or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
|
| What is this "next technology requirement"? My area cable
| company still runs most their network on 30 year old lines.
|
| > -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement
| of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the
| original subscriber price
|
| Cost of doing business, doesn't matter the size.
|
| I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal
| broadband can be. It's why big players spend so much lobbying
| and bribing so they can keep their established position running
| and keep the gravy train running, but really the economics of
| it are fantastic once you've done the initial digging and
| running the lines, which sounds like he has here.
|
| At $55 /mo for 400 households he's bringing in $22,000 a month
| plus whatever federal and local government subsidies and
| grants. The odds of a disaster, or one of the other scenarios
| you mentioned happening anytime soon is low, so he will have
| runway to build a decent sized war-chest to be able to easily
| afford handling any of these scenarios with third party
| contractors. The more houses he brings on line, the better it
| gets.
| supernova87a wrote:
| > _Easy. Refuse service. You aren 't legally obligated to
| offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to
| do or not do business with whoever they want, provided
| they're not refusing service for a reason that violates
| local, state, or federal law_.
|
| Then isn't this a point against the scalability / feasibility
| of this idea working broadly for others or becoming a model
| for replacing dumb telcos?
|
| If part of the reason telcos are the way they are is because
| they have to serve everyone, and at some point if you run a
| service like this you will run into that requirement, then
| you will too become like a telco because of those
| obligations. And this is just one example of a factor that
| starts to matter.
|
| I try to help out in my HOA of 25 people to manage the
| utilities, infrastructure, landscaping, and even with this
| small a group people are uncooperative and 1-2 people are
| constantly questioning and threatening to sue if we don't do
| what they say. Hundreds/thousands of people is even more a
| nightmare.
| icedchai wrote:
| I'm in a condo here, with an HOA / board, and it was a pain
| in the ass to get fiber brought in from the local telco.
| They wasted months sending out letters, waiting for people
| to give input, votes, etc. until they finally agreed it was
| a good idea. The telco pays for the whole install:
| trenching, digging, running fiber between the buildings,
| etc. That doesn't matter, because you still have people
| complaining about the utilities messing up their lawn.
|
| It's been over a year now and the project still isn't done.
| The fiber is right on the street, not even 30 feet from my
| unit. I'd have paid a couple grand to get my own conduit
| brought in, if that was an option.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > threatening to sue if we don't do what they say.
|
| I do love the occasional power trip. I'd look them straight
| in the face: "here's our lawyers number, have your lawyer
| give my lawyer a call. Since you seem to be so adamant
| about suing, you should have no further contact with me.
| I'll see you to the door." and if they don't go? Arrest
| them for trespassing.
|
| Sounds like a great power trip.
| nomel wrote:
| > Then isn't this a point against the scalability
|
| The technical solution would be a QOS that
| deprioritizes/throttles these people first, with clear
| wording in the contract. The reality is that these people
| are a negligible fraction of the users.
| jedberg wrote:
| Right, but that's OPs point. If he does what you say, he's no
| better than Comcast, ignoring customers and telling them to
| screw themselves at the first sign of trouble.
| greesil wrote:
| Yeah but at least they're getting gigabit from an asshole,
| instead of 1.5 Mbps from an asshole.
| II2II wrote:
| I'm with an ISP that is fairly well known for having poor
| support. I have never had an issue with them. They deal
| with problems on their end efficiently and without
| complaint. I would never expect them to deal with a problem
| on my end, so they never have an excuse to provide me with
| poor customer service. It all works fairly well,
| particularly since I am paying about the half the price
| compared to a major telecom company.
|
| Compare that to a major telecom company. Even if I took the
| same approach, I would have more issues to deal with
| (typically issues over billing, rather than technical
| problems).
| mattnewton wrote:
| There's still a country mile between what gp is suggesting
| and what Comcast gets away with because of their monopoly
| position.
|
| Anecdotally, I replaced a router they gave me because it
| would randomly crap out (probably neighbors using the
| xfinity Wi-Fi feature I couldn't turn off), and they kept
| trying to charge me a monthly rental fee for their router.
| Every time I would call with confirmation it had been
| returned, the charge would be removed for just that month
| and back again the next - this is just the most recent
| example of a long line of infuriating time wasting schemes
| I have dealt with from them.
| justrudd wrote:
| This happened to me as well with Cox Cable in AZ back in
| the early 2000s. I returned the modem and got the
| returned receipt. Next 6 months I had to call and get
| them to reverse the charges. At that point, I started
| recording all the calls each time I had to call and get
| the charge reversed. Recorded 5 months of calls, had them
| transcribed, and sent the transcriptions, recordings, and
| a copy of the return receipt to the AG's office saying "I
| believe Cox is committing fraud, and I wonder how many
| people they're doing this to". Never heard from Cox
| again. I did actually wonder how many people just
| continued paying it because "it's just $5 a month"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >I think people don't understand just how profitable
| municipal broadband can be.
|
| Operating the network might be profitable. Recouping
| installation costs are not, when Comcast and other coaxial
| cable internet providers are sitting there ready to undercut
| you the second you enter the market. Unfortunately,
| sufficient customers are not willing to pay more for a
| reliable symmetric fiber connection yet over whatever the
| cable company is offering with meager upload.
|
| Also, I assume you mean fiber when you wrote "municipal
| broadband". I thought municipal broadband refers to taxpayer
| funded internet networks, where there would be no profit
| required (and hence is the only alternative to getting a
| better internet connection than the cable company).
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm going to skate past the fact that difficult customers and
| maintenance aren't why monopolies are expensive, in fact
| they're the things that are most amenable to economies of
| scale, so _bigger gets cheaper_.
|
| The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the
| 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal
| have to be to _defeat and replace Comcast_ rather than to
| supply internet service to his neighbors?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Displacing Comcast in any degree us a major service to the
| species.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| He doesn't of course. Local/muni/coop last mile is a well
| worn path. It's your local volunteer fire department, but for
| internet, and local self reliance is not a bad thing. It
| doesn't have to grow, it doesn't have to constantly evolve,
| it just has to work and be reliable. That is what
| infrastructure does, and when it does so, it's mostly
| invisible (and I argue, that is its most beautiful form).
|
| https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/
|
| https://muninetworks.org/
| devmunchies wrote:
| the same reason one would file for patents without any intent
| of enforcing them. For defense and security.
|
| I would say that to attempt to have zero growth/shrinkage is
| difficult in business. The market is always changing,
| people's preferences change, etc. If you _try_ to stagnate
| you will likely find yourself shrinking, either because
| demand changes, or there are mixups in supply (competitors).
|
| If shrinking is the only non-goal, then growth is likely the
| only prevention since stagnation is hard to ensure.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The reason he exists is because the competition is bad. If
| the competition is good, he has no reason to exist. The
| goal is to supply 600 rural households with broadband at a
| reasonable price, not to own 600 households.
| Willish42 wrote:
| Exactly. There are tons of smaller businesses not focused on
| infinitely growing that get by just fine. Especially in rural
| areas like these
| devmunchies wrote:
| for every small business that "gets by", there are 2
| (probably more) that go out of business due to not having
| grown sufficiently by the time they face some competition.
| chriscappuccio wrote:
| With a fiber based service he would be getting very few calls
| linsomniac wrote:
| Except, potentially, for locates. In my conversation with one
| of our local ISPs that for a while was doing fiber builds but
| then stopped, locates were quite a nuisance for them. This
| was in a less rural location though.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| What's a "locate"?
| wmf wrote:
| Hopefully with the government funding he can turn it into a
| real business.
| Victerius wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised to see his business pop up on HN's
| "Who wants to hire" thread.
| connorlads wrote:
| Not sure how Canada compares but these concerns haven't stopped
| the biggest telecoms in Canada from providing subpar service
| under very restrictive terms and conditions with no
| accountability. Namely, a 12 hour complete outage by Rogers to
| which the reply was basically a big shrug. If they can get away
| with that I am sure a small independant provider can get away
| with that as well.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| I'm not convinced this is the case. The big thing that makes
| telco's such profit making machines is that wires in the ground
| are generally a large capital expense that doesn't really
| provide a great marketplace for competition. But once you've
| got that infrastructure, it's hard to duplicate. The rest of
| the equipment and employees relatively aren't that expensive.
|
| So the power is on the provider here, there isn't really
| another choice for customers if the article is to be believed,
| no matter how good or bad the company is. Sure there might be
| disputes with vendors, but that's just part of any business.
|
| The biggest threat IMO is probably some sort of competition.
| Maybe a big telco decides to wire up the area, although then
| they would be the second player in the market trying to steal
| customers who may not be interested in switching. Or if this
| really is a rural area, things like wireless last mile
| (basically LTE), Starlink, OneWeb, etc may start to be more
| compelling options if they get the capacity, latency, and price
| point to the right spot to be competitive.
| treis wrote:
| Telcos aren't really that great of profit making machines.
| It's a capital intensive business that requires a lot of
| scale before making money.
|
| Look at what this guy is doing. Many millions to get 600
| customers paying <$100 a month.
| ninju wrote:
| As the old adage goes...it takes money to make money.
|
| A couple mill up front to get 500k+/yr means ROI of 5
| years.
|
| It's a sustainable model as long as you don't get greedy
| and I don't think this guys is doing this to be a
| 'gazillionare' :-)
| vineyardmike wrote:
| His millions were funded by the government.. and the legacy
| providers also could bid on the contracts. It's not clear
| if he's expected to pay off those funds or not (I assume
| not). As the saying goes, the best money is someone else's.
| gridspy wrote:
| It seems that the ISP motivation comes from lack of other
| options. Should a viable competitor emerge, that might be
| considered a "win" w.r.t rural customers having good
| broadband choices.
| colechristensen wrote:
| In Minneapolis there is a local fiber provider which charges
| about the same for the same level of fiber connectivity. I
| think it's pretty sustainable.
|
| It looks like his revenue is going to be $50k/mo in not so long
| and that's more than enough to have a couple of people willing
| to work on an as-needed hourly rate and to cover whatever
| issues come up.
| bentobean wrote:
| I, too, greatly respect the scrappy-ness of this individual.
| Kudos to him for sticking it to Comcast. That said, I'm not
| wild about the notion of dropping $30K of our collective money
| on running fiber to a single home out in the country.
| ncmncm wrote:
| He was getting that money regardless. He decided to drop it
| on that.
| devmunchies wrote:
| This was during covid lockdowns, right? It wouldn't be fair
| for the govt to enforce a lockdown and not provide
| funds/grants for internet infra.
| syklep wrote:
| Government money is still our collective money.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| A couple of fun facts about this guy:
|
| His little ISP is AS267, which is a SHOCKINGLY low number. That's
| like.. the ISP equiv of a 4 digit slashdot id, or owning
| something like sodapop.com.
|
| He's also one of the authors of RFC 5575, which is a pretty big
| deal in the DDoS world.
| notyourday wrote:
| Jared is not a rando who built an ISP. He is someone who forgot
| more about networking and running NSPs than most people know.
| kloch wrote:
| I don't know (or care) about how he got that ASN but ARIN does
| occasionally recycle returned 3 or 4 digit ASN's, including
| very recently: 20220607|arin|US|asn|888|1|assig
| ned|66e25d155d3f3d57ff208733b59f8cc8 20220607|arin|US|asn
| |889|1|assigned|5b048aafff56a02f895e68ac5188853b 20220607
| |arin|US|asn|890|1|assigned|708d3f11915973323c76a5f95fa2d775
| 20220607|arin|US|asn|891|1|assigned|ab9bfca0becd32b7fe44c7ea0ba
| 1aac3 20220607|arin|US|asn|892|1|assigned|0b9118a23862aab
| 1647fd26939f7b219 20220607|arin|US|asn|893|1|assigned|57d
| 59e6dfd1cd07523724f9cf5fc572b 20220607|arin|US|asn|894|1|
| assigned|0a932835b90a81bffeb1539b4bc93040
|
| The first time ARIN did this with a lot of 4-digit ASN's was
| 2009 and was how Netflix was able to get AS2906.
|
| There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed
| anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)
| tptacek wrote:
| He's been a backbone guy since the the mid-1990s.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| pc literally said he was not talking about this guy, can't
| win I guess
| gertlex wrote:
| The way it was written, it left many of us wondering what
| the answer to the question was, though.
| ev1 wrote:
| In this case, this wasn't recycled - his is actually decades
| old
| upupandup wrote:
| can somebody ELI5? what is this code mean? what is RFC 5575?
| tptacek wrote:
| The RFC number is less interesting then the ASN; he has a low
| ASN, which is for backbone nerds a little like getting a very
| short domain name; the short ones are long since exhausted,
| so it's like an O.G. indicator.
|
| (An ASN is a BGP4 network number; think of it as an address
| in the backbone routing network.)
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| RFC 5575 is a widely adopted specification implemented by
| router vendors that lets ISPs (think Comcast, Verizon,
| Deutsche Telekom, Akamai) block certain kinds of traffic at
| their routers using rules called "Flow Specifications". A
| rule looks _something_ like "Drop traffic if it's on Port 80
| and its packet size is 252 bits". That level of logic is good
| enough to block many simple DDoS attacks, and since it's done
| on a router, it's hardware that the ISP has to buy anyway.
| The more expensive / but also more powerful solution usually
| involves a dedicated piece of hardware that does packet
| inspection.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Yeah FPGA's are marketed for packet inspection. Like on
| xilinx.com, and microsemi.com, they talk about radar and
| military, defense, on top of AI and fintech. It's just
| really hard to market FPGA's, it's such a shiny toy but
| then it never ends up actually selling in volume, like
| GPUs, there's envy of that success. Especially because in
| many ways F's have merits that go toe-to-toe with GPU, and
| defeat them in eg latency, which is why Wall Street prefers
| F's to GPU's. Just not enough killer apps.
|
| And packet inspection is a good fit for F's [FPGA's] by
| their very nature, DDoS's are squirrely and ASICs get
| stale, you need to reprogram you F's on the fly to catch
| that attack in-progress. So to adapt to new attacks on the
| fly, or update based on new fashions of DDoS's, patch
| vulnerabilities, and plus they're harder to reverse-
| engineer than ASICs, they're strong against that, good
| crypto to protect the bitstreams that define them.
| Basically built for that. ASICs on the other hand, can just
| have the lid scraped, take a photo, done. (Though to some
| extent they do put functionality on memory that gets lost
| if the chip is turned off during abduction, that _can_ be
| done, the line between F 's and ASICs is not truly that
| sharp).
|
| A lot of DDoS's are done by state-sponsored or -affiliated
| or -harbored adversaries, capturing the ASIC that stops the
| DDoS is a real thing. Reverse engineering usually happens
| in another country, another jurisdiction. Under smiling
| eyes, blind eyes, can't get the police to go there, can't
| get extradition, _maybe_ sue, _maybe_ get them punished
| within the country that harbors them.[1]
|
| [1] I read in China there was a Chinese man who traveled to
| New Zealand and murdered somebody, I think a woman. But he
| would not be extradited. Instead, the New Zealanders
| presented their evidence in Chinese court, which found it
| had merit and credibility enough to imprison the murder,
| within China, so he paid for his crimes fully. All without
| extraditing one of their own.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Amidst all the discussion of fpga vs asic vs flowspec,
| it's probably worth distinguishing two types of attacks:
| big, dumb volumetric ddos (flow specifications are great
| and cheap here, if you can match), and more sophisticated
| layer 5/6/7 attacks where FPGA/packet inspectors are
| likely necessary (unless you get lucky and the supposedly
| smart attack has an obvious signature such as a
| particular packet length combined with other components)
| grumple wrote:
| RFCs are Requests for Comments, which are what are considered
| potential standards in the technical world:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
|
| Here's this one:
|
| https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5575.html
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| What is an ASN and what advantage is there to have a low
| number?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's an NFT representing early participation on the Internet.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Hardly non-fungible but yes, it means you've been on the
| internet for long.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| ASN is an Autonomous System Number. An ISP is the primary
| example of an Autonomous System. There are other
| organizations that have ASNs like data centers.
|
| The internet is decentralized. Basically, each autonomous
| system is its own network. This means that they need to
| connect with one another in order to allow traffic between
| each other. This is called peering. In order to peer with
| another network you must have an ASN.
|
| The number doesn't matter.
| cesarb wrote:
| ASN = Autonomous System Number
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_System_Number),
| it's a number which identifies an ISP in the core Internet
| routing protocol (BGP). A low ASN usually means your ISP has
| been part of the Internet for a long time; other than the
| 16-bit vs 32-bit ASN distinction, it has no practical effect,
| besides implying that your ISP is one of the "old-timers".
| changoplatanero wrote:
| vanity
| bad416f1f5a2 wrote:
| I recognized his name from providing hosting for the
| outages.org list[0] - if you haven't subscribed, and you do
| anything operations at all, go hit the button now.
|
| [0]: https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Not come across this list before.
|
| I'm being a bit lazy here but do you happen to know if there
| is a way to consume this programatically? I'm thinking RSS or
| perhaps an API?
|
| Edit: For the benefit of others who might be interested, I've
| just subscribed using Feedbin's [0] email-to-RSS feature so
| updates will appear in my RSS reader!
|
| [0] https://feedbin.com
| ev1 wrote:
| This is a mailing list. Subscribe and point it to something
| that can ingest messages, similar to how you would pipe
| support@ to a helpdesk and auto-create tickets.
| ajdude wrote:
| My university's is number 2; is there any significance to that?
| Victerius wrote:
| Is your university among these?
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/03/...
| sentientslug wrote:
| (Not the guy you replied to, but) it's not, unless I am
| missing it. ASN 2 is University of Delaware. You can search
| for yourself at whois.arin.net, just type a number in the
| search bar in the upper right.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| University of Delaware, per this:
| https://dnschecker.org/asn-whois-lookup.php?query=AS2
|
| So, not on that map, but it was part of ARPANET by the time
| the TCP/IP protocol was introduced in 1983[0], per this
| map: https://www.historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=6456
|
| [0]: https://blog.google/inside-google/googlers/marking-
| birth-of-...
| jonathantf2 wrote:
| I wonder why there's so many weird domains being hosted
| on AS2? https://dnslytics.com/bgp/as2 (scroll down to Top
| Domains)
| icedchai wrote:
| They are probably not actually hosted on AS2. Bad actors
| can inject garbage into BGP AS paths, either accidentally
| or deliberately.
| rOOb85 wrote:
| Interesting
| xhrpost wrote:
| > "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to
| get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over
| $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."
|
| I did a lot of investigation some years back hoping to start an
| ISP in a much more dense city where options were still limited. I
| had quotes from electrical companies of $25k-75k to run 2,000ft
| of aerial fiber on telephone poles (no drilling even!) The
| electrical company (who owns the poles) said that only certified
| installers could do it but that list was rather short and the
| person I spoke with didn't seem to know what that certification
| actually was. I wonder if this guy simply figured out how to
| legally do the infra layout himself.
| samwhiteUK wrote:
| I'm going to put my hand up and say I have absolutely no idea how
| an ISP works. He runs cables to each house in the area... now
| where does the other end go?
| andix wrote:
| I think you more or less just buy connections from bigger ISPs,
| so for example you get a 100 Gbps connection to one location
| and distribute it to your end users from there.
|
| Most of the equipment you can buy, you can even get a lot of
| the needed things as a service. You just need to organize all
| those hardware and software things, and get the economic and
| legal part right too. And in the end it needs to tie together
| in a way, that your earnings are bigger then your expenses.
|
| I think it's not so different to opening a car repair shop for
| example. Just more nerdy.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| There is a very good Ars Technica article on how an ISP works.
| It traces the whole network, from submarine cable through to
| last mile into a house. It was written in 2016, but I imagine
| it's still relevant:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Thank you, that was a great link for us uninitiated folks.
|
| Also another great plug for ArsTechnica (even though the main
| article is them as well, and I'm sure most of this audience
| is well aware of them) and the excellent technical writing
| they do.
| Bloating wrote:
| There are wholesalers that provide "dark fiber", then you buy
| data services from another "wholesaler". When I looked into it,
| dark fiber was available through some utilities and through a
| government funded non-profit. Data to light-up the fiber was
| available through several different data centers that connected
| to that dark fiber.
|
| You still had to build-out the last mile though, and thats what
| will get you. You either need private easements, or be a
| registered telecom utility to use public utility easements.
| That last mile is $20k +/-, depending on your circumstances. If
| your semi-rural or less, there's ROI sucks. Hence, many smaller
| ISPs are wireless.
|
| At least in area, there are already a number of wISPs, 5G is
| rolling out, Starlink eventually. and lots of gov't funding
| going to the big players to expand their networks (and drive
| the start-ups out of business.)
|
| There some other business models out there too that look
| interesting. Underline in Co Springs, for example. They provide
| a basic tier of service, in order to qualify as a telecom,
| install the fiber and then allow multiple competing ISPs to use
| their network.
|
| IMHO, any utility that has the benefit of government privilege
| should be required to allow competors to use the infrastructure
| that the taxpayers funded.
|
| I'm waiting on one of you brilliant folks to defy the laws of
| physics to create a decentralized, wireless mesh internet.
| thedougd wrote:
| https://www.segra.com/
|
| These guys have dark fiber right in front of my neighborhood.
| They service cell sites for Dish Network near me as well.
| It's interesting to look through their services. For example,
| you can get fiber service with layer 2, where you're
| responsible for adding your IP stack over top of it. Or you
| can buy at layer 3, where Segra is already running a stack,
| and establish mesh connectivity. So if a fiber is cut, you'll
| get another working path. Build your network over the top.
|
| Pretty interesting to understand what's available.
| wyager wrote:
| Last mile subsidies are super weird. I was looking at a
| property in montana in the middle of nowhere that had no
| electricity nearby, but had gigabit fiber. I called the ISP
| and it was cheaper to get phone+Gb than just Gb due to
| subsidy rules.
|
| Basically everyone out there (including me) is on starlink
| now. Turns out the subsidies were not only inefficient, but
| pretty pointless.
| aftbit wrote:
| Why would you be using Starlink if you have gigabit fiber
| available? Or was it still quite expensive to install even
| with the subsidy?
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| They helped a bit, for a while. Gigabit fiber is less
| maintenance than electrical power, and it's easier to roll-
| your-own electrical power than it is to get a Gb connection
| like how would you do that before Starlink, buy an insane
| amount of radio spectrum? I heard one HN user who did
| exactly that in Brazil, got a 20-meter tower to connect by
| radio to the internet some distance away, and it was a very
| solid high bandwidth connection. But still much harder than
| a generator and solar panels, or a tiny little hydropower
| generator on a stream (a great option in places like
| Southern Chile, not a joke by any means). Or wind.
| notRobot wrote:
| There's "Start Your Own ISP":
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| southerntofu wrote:
| As the other commenters have pointed out, a possibility is
| simply to "resell" transit from other providers. However, on
| the Internet all peering networks are somewhat equal and it's
| entirely possible to extend the "other end" over time to
| establish dedicated peering with other networks, so that for
| example traffic from your network to Youtube doesn't have to go
| through (paid-for) 3rd parties.
|
| There's good chances there are Internet eXchange Points around
| where you live where for a small maintenance fee anyone can
| come and place their router and cables to interconnect with
| others.
|
| So the likely steps are:
|
| 1) Find a transit provider, that will serve your trafic to any
| other network, and where to connect with this provider 2)
| (Optional) If you don't have the necessary infrastructure, find
| another provider to get from your last-mile network to your
| transit provider 3) (Optional) Find other networks to peer with
| so that you can significantly reduce your transit bill and
| provide better routes (therefore better service)
|
| Some non-profit ISPs take the problem from the other side, and
| build a core network without necessarily owning any last-mile
| infrastructure, which is leased from other operators (
| _operateurs de collecte_ ) with whom they interconnect at some
| datacenter/IXP. The most famous example of that in France is
| FDN.fr which has been operating since early 90s. That approach
| is more cost-effective in high-density area where the local
| infrastructure is already quite good, and construction jobs to
| lay new cables is very costly, but will still set you back
| 10-30EUR/month/line.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Not sure if it's what the person in question did, but there's a
| whole guide that pops up on here occasionally regarding
| building a wireless ISP.
|
| https://startyourownisp.com/
| dataflow wrote:
| I can't find any section of that guide that talks about
| peering or whatever ISPs are supposed to do to connect to the
| broader internet. Do you see any step that explains this?
| bombcar wrote:
| As a small ISP you don't peer - you just buy transit from a
| bigger ISP. So the basic steps are:
|
| 1. Buy a 1G/1G or 10G/10G whatever link to a building you
| own.
|
| 2. Resell that link in parts to customers.
|
| Or you can get yourself into a POP (point of presence)
| somewhere that multiple providers are also in, and get
| transit that way. Depends on where you are and what you can
| get access to.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| You definitely can (and should) peer as a small ISP, even
| if you are buying transit from other providers. This is
| especially true if you're running an MPLS headend as
| you'll still have choke points at L2 circuits in your own
| network. Owning your own peering can be a great way to
| offload traffic to other circuits that share
| destinations, most commonly traffic destined for
| VOD/streaming CDNs.
|
| (N.B. -- This is what has worked well for the WISP I
| cofounded, but YMMV depending on headend infra).
| nixgeek wrote:
| As a small ISP you definitely can peer and many do, you
| just aren't going to get settlement-free peering with any
| of the big eyeball networks like Comcast.
|
| Something like Seattle IX is a good example of where lots
| of peering sessions could be established (although I
| haven't looked at Jared's ASN in any detail to see where
| it's present).
|
| https://www.seattleix.net/home
|
| Any traffic you're able to offload via peering you
| wouldn't be paying an IP transit to haul, so it's worth
| seeing if networks like Netflix are on the Route Servers
| (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/documentation/ams-ix-route-
| server...) at any IX nearby your network, seeing if you
| can negotiate a session over the IX even if they don't
| participate in the RS, or seeing if you can do PNI (sling
| a cable between your networks in a facility you're both
| located in).
|
| Edit: Jared's on Detroit IX.
| https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20268
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Wait. The poster above said in point 1 to buy a line,1G,
| 10g depending on your upstream seller. Why do you need
| peering then?
|
| If I have 1Gbps line for example and 10 users each are
| using equal amount 100% of time, it shouldn't matter they
| send the data to Alaska or Russia or Australia ? Or does
| it?
|
| Do you buy the pipe and the data itself also?
| icedchai wrote:
| You don't "need" peering but it offloads your upstream
| (transit) links, which are generally much more expensive.
| In the old days, I worked for couple ISPs and we
| typically had 3 or 4 upstreams (generally UUNet, Sprint,
| MCI...) This was back when a T1 was still considered
| fast.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Any traffic you're able to offload via peering you
| wouldn't be paying an IP transit to haul
|
| When you're small enough, the difference in price between
| transit and what it takes to get you to an IX is likely
| to be pretty small. But, you probably want to be at an IX
| sooner or later anyway (easier to get multiple transit
| offers at an IX than on the side of the road), so might
| as well peer while you're there.
| twothamendment wrote:
| Yes, it can be pretty simple. Back in the day when DSL
| and comcast were the options and all of the connections
| were things like UP TO 5 or even 20 Mbps, but speeds were
| rarely that - I paid for a dedicated 2Mbs up and down
| ($180/month) with no restrictions on use and started
| sharing/reselling it to others in my apartment building,
| not with wireless, but with cat5 out the window, up the
| gutter, back inside, etc. Across the parking lot another
| guy was sharing his comcast with another building - but
| comcast was starting to be so slow they couldn't use it.
| We merged our empires by stringing some cat 5 across the
| parking lot, around a pole and to his place. Later we
| added more nearby buildings, all wired until we had 5
| buildings and about 20 "subscribers". Even with 2Mbps,
| everyone on the network was happier with a guaranteed
| speed than their flaky "up to" speeds they used to have.
| Did I run an ISP? I had subscribers, had to maintain a
| network, had a proxy server to reduce requests out of the
| network, had to deal with abuse and collect money - so
| I'd say yes, a small one, but yes.
| smeyer wrote:
| Out of curiosity did you do things above board from a
| business standpoint (taxes etc.) or was this more of a
| blackmarket setup?
| haunter wrote:
| It's the 2nd step
|
| https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/
|
| If you just Google then it's usually called leased or
| dedicated internet
|
| Just some (US) examples
|
| https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-
| internet...
|
| https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-
| intern...
|
| https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet
| -...
| dataflow wrote:
| So they're _leasing_ ( "buying"?) fiber from the same
| ISPs they're trying to displace _and_ relying on that
| payment to provide them with continued internet access?
| This doesn 't sound like a real first-class ISP, but
| something akin to an MVNO where they're at the mercy of
| the same companies they're competing with. I get the
| initial sale might seem fine, and the established ISPs
| might be fine with this as long as the company is small,
| but why wouldn't these companies shut them off (or raise
| the prices, etc.) when they grow too big to become
| dangerous?
| wins32767 wrote:
| He's not trying to displace the majors. In rural areas,
| owning and maintaining a bunch of fiber to service less
| than a thousand customers isn't a business Comcast really
| wants to be in unless they get paid a ton for it.
| q3k wrote:
| You can lease fibre/lambda/L2 transport to an IXP (and
| there peer with other local ISPs and get global transit
| from Tier 1 providers) from many companies that don't
| even have any residential offering.
|
| Or if (technically/financially/legally) possible, even
| run your own fibre to a PoP housing an IXP on your own.
|
| Once you're in multiple PoPs and on multiple IXPs and
| with multiple upstreams/peers you're pretty much
| independent from the whims of a single ISP.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because it's all business to them, and if they did it
| overtly they could get sued.
|
| But also because once you're in a single location, you
| can pretty easily get multiple providers to that location
| for a Price, so there's really no point. Even small rural
| towns usually have multiple internet connections from
| different companies, and if they don't you can pay to run
| fiber if you really wanted to.
|
| People find it hard to believe, but Comcast et al are
| actually businesses, not Satan's marketing department;
| and they happily take money even from "competitors".
| themoonisachees wrote:
| To expand on that:
|
| Comcast would much rather sell a dedicated fiber to a
| business with capital and guarantees.
|
| Selling to the individual consumer doesn't make a lot of
| sense business-wise, because of the deployment costs and
| continued support costs.
|
| Comcast is also abusing their status as oligopoly to
| gouge costumers financially and qos-wise, but if they're
| selling to a business that buys large quantities and has
| staff who's job it is to handle network problems, they
| actually like that (right up until that business
| threatens to compete with them in areas where said
| oligopoly is in place, of course)
| dboreham wrote:
| You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale
| market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market
| which he is selling into. Some providers service both the
| wholesale and retail markets, but typically with
| different divisions, people, tech, resources. It's like
| saying that if you build a gas station and buy your gas
| from Exxon then that's bad because Exxon also operates
| gas stations. It's not like an MVNO where all you're
| doing is sending the customer a bill, and provisioning
| API requests to Verizon.
| dataflow wrote:
| > You're misunderstanding this market. There's a
| wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a
| retail market which he is selling into. Some providers
| service both the wholesale and retail markets, but
| typically with different divisions, people, tech,
| resources.
|
| The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't
| explain anything for me. They're both the same company
| with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a
| dozen. It's not like the executives are oblivious to how
| much money each unit is making and whether another unit
| could make more in place of it. If you're the CEO and see
| you could charge twice as much by doing retail instead of
| wholesale then you'd obviously try to do that.
|
| Rather, the explanations I'm getting from the other
| comments seems to be that (a) regulators require some
| kind of reasonable wholesale to exist to third parties,
| (b) the big ISPs aren't planning to serve those markets
| anyway, so they're not missing out on any income by
| taking money from the last-mile ISPs. And as long as
| those last-mile ISPs don't try to compete for the same
| customers then they're fine.
| fragmede wrote:
| > The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources
| doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same
| company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit
| or a dozen.
|
| Then you've not worked in large B2B companies before. Eg
| Apple pays Google money and Google pays money to Apple,
| any perceived public rivalry goes out the window as far
| as business between the two is concerned.
|
| If you're the CEO of Comcast, you've never even heard of
| this small time ISP, you have far bigger things to spend
| your time on, and the "upstream" business unit of Comcast
| _really_ doesn 't care what you're doing, so long as your
| money's green. It's all business. See also: Netflix using
| AWS despite Amazon having a streaming video service of
| their own.
| haunter wrote:
| >This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP
|
| I'm not an expert but afaik you can't just be a Tier 1
| network member
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
|
| Even Tier 2 very limited
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network
|
| In this guide's case yes you will be akin to an MVNO, you
| won't peer but just buying transit traffic. That's why
| most of these guides are also focusing on making the
| network wireless only (easier to build infrastructure)
| mbreese wrote:
| Because there are different business units in the
| upstream company handling the dedicated access vs
| consumer sides. The dedicated business side have their
| own sales goals and if you compete with the consumer
| side, that's not a problem for them. I'm sure there are
| some regulatory/anti competitive measures at play here
| too, but economically, the two sides of the business will
| act more or less independently.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| If you want to try your hand in a playground for the
| software (routing) parts, DN42[1] is essentially one.
|
| [1] https://dn42.us/, https://dn42.eu/, https://dn42.dev/
| kevmo314 wrote:
| From https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/,
| doesn't this site basically say connect to another ISP?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well there three tiers of ISPs, each one buying service
| from the one above them. It's ISPs all the way down, and
| the higher up you go the more expensive the hardware to run
| it gets.
| Macha wrote:
| At the T1 level it's more completely a mesh type setup,
| but even lower tier ISPs might set up peering agreements
| to bypass their main higher tier ISP where it makes sense
| for cost or service quality reasons. Or refuse to to
| extract more money as in the comcast vs level1 disputes
| over netflix traffic a while back
| [deleted]
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| I feel like this could be made into an ISP Tycoon game.
| haunter wrote:
| It actually does exist lol! Made by Cisco as an
| e-learning tool
|
| Gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foa34qoRzjs
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150317144142/https://cisco.
| edu...
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| Oh god, it seems to essentially be packet tracer under
| the hood. It's a great tool, but I HATED using it in
| school.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| gns3 perhaps? I haven't had that setup for a while but I
| loved it. I had my whole small ISP in it at some point to
| work as a test/lab env for testing things out. It's a
| trick to get going but was kinda fun. I took a copy of
| that when I left and every now and then I fire it up and
| mess around with my old dsl/dialup ISP from back in the
| day.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| Dang, as someone that enjoys Tycoons, Tactics, and
| Management Simulators, this really sounds fun.
| wil421 wrote:
| Depending on how close they are he could run cables (ethernet)
| or fiber. Single mode fiber can go 10km according to some
| Ubiquiti spec sheets I found on google. Ubiquiti also sells
| AirMax products that can do PTP or PTMP over the air, although
| some will be affected by rain. They could even rent space from
| a radio/cell tower. There are probably a decent amount of other
| products out there I am only familiar with Ubiquiti.
| nixgeek wrote:
| You can shoot light over SM at distances up to 200km (several
| important caveats at this distance) and it's very usual to
| see spans of between 50-80km.
| wil421 wrote:
| Looking further you can get a UFiber OLT Terminal for
| $1,799 that can run 20km and support 1024 clients or 128
| ONU CPEs per port.
|
| How much would a 200km switch run?
| Nikbul wrote:
| At this distance you would want a good repeater at about
| half point instead. Don't forget that data has to travel
| back and other side might not have such a strong signal
| iptrans wrote:
| The switch does not care what kind of optics you use. You
| can use a $50 switch is you like.
|
| The 200 km optics, however, cost about a grand each.
| boplicity wrote:
| He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That
| works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113
| months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue.
|
| Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder
| grants like this are necessary.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This is how the ISPs work as well, typically 10 years is common
| ROI for any neighborhood and 5-10 years for multi-family
| housing (apartment) runs. This is also the reason AT&T/Comcast
| won't run new installations to small (less than 40 residents in
| my experience) or rural neighborhoods since the ROI time gets
| longer the fewer potential customers they have.
| pphysch wrote:
| Has a road or water line ever paid for itself?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Well the US economy has boomed for the last 250 years or so
| and depends pretty heavily on roads and thirsty humans. Those
| investments seem to have given more than they took, by a very
| wide margin.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's a utility. Utilities have very stable revenues and very
| long payback periods. Nine years is pretty short in this
| context
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Not that bad. A lot of utility-type businesses expect to have
| much longer return on investment times, the electric business
| is usually wanting to get 50 years of life out of a new
| baseload generating unit, and it might be 30 or 40 to get your
| investment back.
| jrajav wrote:
| So taxpayer dollars are necessary to make this business viable,
| and the product of that business is something that,
| realistically, everyone absolutely needs access to - certainly
| seems like this should not be a private business at all but a
| public utility. Have we ever asked this kind of question for
| interstate highways?
| floren wrote:
| The Grant County Public Utility District in eastern
| Washington (and presumably PUDs elsewhere in the nation) did
| exactly that. They built a fiber network throughout the
| county (physically large but pretty sparsely-populated),
| although they don't provide service directly to customers--
| instead, a healthy number of local ISPs still exist in the
| area. If fiber isn't at your house yet, there are also a few
| WISPs, which were easy to stand up because of the fiber.
|
| https://www.grantpud.org/getfiber
| asiachick wrote:
| given the state of the roads and streets in most places in
| the usa I have very little confidence that public internet
| will keep up with maintenance, upgrading the equipment to the
| lastest speeds and standards every 5 yrs.
|
| Commercial ISPs have issues and they should not be given
| local monopolies but even shitty Comcast is better today than
| it was yesterday. The same is not true of most of the roads
| in my state.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| My experience is a bit different. The roads where I live
| (San Francisco) are better than my AT&T options. Roads here
| seem to be repaved every 5-10 years and AT&T still doesn't
| offer a plan that the FCC would classify as broadband to my
| house.
| asiachick wrote:
| I don't know what parts of sf you're referring to but my
| experience of sf is it's pothole hell. Market, Misson,
| anything between market and van Ness, and plenty of
| others
|
| to add, I lived on the east coast in the 80s and I found
| some fellow Californians where we co commiserated about
| how shitty the roads were in Baltimore and how nice they
| were in southern Orange County but now I drive though
| southern Orange County and the roads are clearly in need
| of repair.
| jrajav wrote:
| I disagree with you on the basis that I can get in my car
| right now and be confident that I'll be able to drive with
| speed and safety to any city on the map, and that when I
| get there I'll be able to drink the tap water and to plug
| my electronics into any wall socket without them getting
| fried. Maybe some local municipalities aren't that great at
| keeping up with their last-mile pothole maintenance, and
| maybe that should be an issue the locals prioritize more
| when choosing their representatives - but that doesn't
| represent the average experience.
|
| But also, we're already talking about publicly funded
| infrastructure. We've subsidized broadband to every home
| multiple times by now, and we still continue to write those
| checks. Maybe if we want it to be private we should
| actually enforce that and then see how it goes.
| capableweb wrote:
| The actual price they are offering seems to be $55 or $79/month
| + ~$200 installation fee. Also missing in your calculation, is
| a $30/month subsidy from FCCs "Affordable Connectivity
| Program".
|
| I didn't make the calculation myself, but a sub-10 year horizon
| for a project someone seems to do from the goodness of their
| heart, doesn't seem so bad.
| the_watcher wrote:
| Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am
| assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than
| the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a
| bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total
| revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer
| chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo
| plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years
| (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).
|
| Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served
| or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be
| far cheaper than building out the core network, and the
| article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest,
| this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are
| certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for
| government investments? More of these please!
| boplicity wrote:
| You're also assuming a 100% conversion rate, in terms of
| homes being wired for access. That's a pretty big
| assumption!
| pessimizer wrote:
| He's serving 600 households afaik, not offering service
| to 600 households. So the assumption is that there's a 0%
| attrition rate. Pretty safe assumption for monopolies, or
| for local services with half the price and 5x the
| bandwidth of the other choices.
| boplicity wrote:
| We're talking about the ROI on the 417 houses he's
| installing access for, not his total customer base. 2.6m
| / (417*(55+30)) = months to $2.6 million in revenue.
|
| However, the assumption was that all 417 houses connected
| will become customers. That's a pretty big assumption.
| The actual percentage could be 50% or 90%. I don't know
| -- but surely the answer will have a big impact on the
| time it takes to reach that amount of revenue.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You are completely ignoring any operating costs. For all we
| know monthly profit could be negative, and not 100%.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| ...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.
| intelVISA wrote:
| It's a coping mechanism like lying on the couch watching the
| Olympics and getting angry that some people are able to push
| themselves to incredible feats instead of being happy for them.
|
| Never understood that mindset, when I see 100x engineering
| feats like TempleOS or actually pdrtable executables it
| inspires me to learn more and think outside the box.
| banannaise wrote:
| 10x engineers are a myth when it comes to productivity working
| within a team. There are absolutely 10x engineers when they're
| working on a project more or less completely solo.
| thrashh wrote:
| There are 10x engineers on teams. They just empower everyone
| banannaise wrote:
| Yeah, but that's _also_ different from how people,
| especially management, tend to conceptualize 10x engineers.
| You don 't spot the 10x engineer by looking for the one who
| accomplishes 10x what other engineers do. You spot them by
| looking for the team that's accomplishing 5x what other
| teams are, and then finding the "glue" person on that team.
| hinkley wrote:
| When I look at 10x engineers who look like 10x engineers
| what I typically find instead is a 3x engineer leaving a
| path of destruction behind them. If you give everyone else
| impostor syndrome and difficult processes they slow down,
| and you look better than you are. Than you deserve.
|
| The real heroes are the ones who make everyone else look
| better. But some managers only figure out who that is when
| they quit or when the business lays off the wrong guy
| because Steve produces less than Sarah, but that's because
| Steve is helping people all the time, including Sarah.
| vaidhy wrote:
| There are extremely competent programmers (10x) like there are
| outstanding players in sports and music. They do have an
| outsized impact on the projects they work on. However, they are
| also extremely rare. The problem, IMHO, comes from cult-
| startups where they think they can (a) identify these people in
| an interview (b) build a team of only 10x programmers.
|
| This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers
| they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they
| are smart and their interview process is infallible.
|
| So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual
| banter :).
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Then good luck hiring a well sized team when you've set the
| expectation that everyone needs to be a genius to contribute.
| A successful startup needs to either attract only the best
| engineers or build itself so that most of the work can be
| done by merely good engineers following the company's
| engineering culture.
| mi_lk wrote:
| Whoever says that never met one and isn't one of them. It's so
| obvious once you see it
| hinkley wrote:
| I've met people other people called 10x engineers. Once you
| looked soberly at the development process that illusion has
| faded every time.
|
| Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally
| formulated it's meant to be between your worst and best
| engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot,
| inattentive, sheltered, or all three.
|
| Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in
| sick. They have negative outcomes all the time, which means
| everyone else in the team is infinity times as productive.
|
| What the rest of us think is 10x versus an adequate
| developer, and there are almost none of those. Are there
| people who can work solo and produce as much as a team of 10?
| Sure, but that's because of the communication overhead. Can
| that person join a team of ten and double their output? Only
| if they are a unicorn among unicorns. The easiest way to
| double the output of a team is to double the output of the
| team members. And that doesn't make you look more productive
| than them. If you're not very careful it makes you look
| _less_ productive.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Absolutely, all your points are spot on, I just call it 10x
| engineering because it's way easier than having to
| articulate the whole:
|
| "Developer who is fortunate enough to be competent, in a
| structure with minimal comms overhead, high autonomy and no
| dead weight"
|
| ...and it tends to kickstart some good discussion on the
| topic as a whole.
| jononomo wrote:
| A+ comment. I've been hearing this idea that "there is no such
| thing as a 10x engineer" for almost a decade now and from the
| very first moment I heard it I considered it one of the most
| definitively untrue ideas circulating in the tech industry. In
| fact, there are 100x engineers.
| folkrav wrote:
| Most the criticisms of the "10x engineer" thing I've seen
| were more about this expectation that everyone can be 10x,
| when they're more the exception than the rule. Your average
| programmer is just that: average.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| The reason people say it's a myth is because the study that
| purported to identify this concept was found to have an
| extremely small population and confounding factors. In
| addition if I remember correctly it tried to do this
| identification by using a contrived programming problem.
|
| There are obviously software devs who are more productive
| than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is
| thinking that (a) companies can somehow identify these people
| in advance, and (b) it is better to prioritize building a
| team with these supposed rock stars than it is to build a
| team of potentially average developers who know how to work
| together, and then properly manage, support & motivate them.
| A team of ten properly supported 1.5x programmers will beat
| out one 10x programmer every time. And in many cases the "I'm
| a 10x dev" personality type does not play well with others.
|
| I'm a firm believer that any genuinely interested, motivated
| and at least mildly intelligent dev can be made highly
| productive by finding the right fit. It's far more important
| for companies to focus on fit and on ensuring that their own
| managers actually know how to manage than on trying to tap
| into a hidden stream of 10x devs.
|
| I guess it boils down to the fact that I think many companies
| absolve themselves and their mgmt team of blame for poor
| performance by saying "well we just haven't been able to
| identify 10x devs yet." They expect to be able to hire a
| single employee who will save the day for them, rather than
| hiring and training good mgmt.
| jononomo wrote:
| First, the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type is not a 10x
| dev. Arrogance is a sign of insecurity.
|
| Second, I don't think a team of ten 1.5x programmers will
| beat out a 10x programmer. You either have the depth of
| understanding and imagination or you don't. Take Linus
| Torvalds, for instance -- I would say he is a 100x
| programmer, or perhaps a 10,000x programmer, since he is
| the author of both Git and Linux -- good luck trying to
| replicate that contribution with a "well managed team". It
| is similar in many areas -- 10 guys with Math PhDs do not
| make one Einstein.
|
| In the context of hiring for a business that is developing
| a CRUD app, you're usually trying to differentiate between
| 1x programmers and 0.1x programmers, however -- 10x
| programmers aren't often looking for work.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| If we get to expand the definition from a software engineer on
| a team to a business founder, do we also get to call the fiber
| optics 10X engineers? Is a truck driver delivering laptops a
| 10X engineer?
| thankful69 wrote:
| That also depends on the X, from my experience working at
| FAANGs, startups, etc... I have never seen a 10x engineer in
| good teams, I have only seen "10x engineers" on teams without
| great engineers. The comparison with sports and music is pretty
| silly, as those are environment where the winner(s) take all
| (there can only be one Billie Eillish (lol) even tho there are
| many singers who are better), engineering is often a team
| effort. In the other hand, the best engineers I have seen, just
| spend more time than anybody else working on a problem, and
| often are the ones who like to show off more, and very often
| lack the skills in other areas of life.
| hinkley wrote:
| I've seen too many prolific engineers who destroy the
| confidence and productivity of people around them. These are
| not people you want to aspire to be.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > Jared Mauch is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in
| government money.
|
| > Mauch told us he provides free 250Mbps service to a church that
| was previously having trouble with its Comcast service.
|
| That's interesting, he's taking money from the government and
| giving free internet to a religious organization? Do _all_
| "churches" get free internet or just the ones he prefers?
| Taxpayers are OK subsidizing a specific church based on one
| person's personal whim???
| xupybd wrote:
| He picked a charity to help and this is your response?
|
| He won a government contract to with specific deliverables. I'm
| not sure how he would have any responsibilities beyond those
| deliverables.
| aisengard wrote:
| I know this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. If someone can
| prove he's discriminating against institutions on the basis of
| religion, he can be sued. Whether he takes money from the
| government or not doesn't matter in the slightest.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > user: zzzeek
|
| > about: ...I am a strong proponent of sarcasm.
|
| So - difficult to interpret this comment.
|
| An atheist might reasonably do the same for churches in his
| service area, for P.R. and Marketing reasons.
|
| How is this different from Bob - who (say) the township pays to
| mow the lawn & plow the parking lot at the township hall -
| deciding that he'll mow the lawn & plow the parking lot for
| free at some local church?
| jquery wrote:
| Meanwhile I live in San Francisco and I still can't get
| affordable symmetric gigabit fiber internet to my home.
| fragmede wrote:
| More frustrating is to chart how close you actually _are_ to
| gigabyte symmetric. AT &T and Sonic has wired up large parts of
| the city but if they don't serve you, it's often by just a
| block or two, depending on where you are in the city. Rumor has
| it that local ISP MonkeyBrains is also getting in on the fiber
| game.
| CliffStoll wrote:
| 2 years ago, Sonic pulled fiber in my neighborhood in the East
| Bay. Gigabit is $65/month (including taxes/fees + 1 unused
| phone line). Very happy with Sonic!
| bannedbybros wrote:
| notatoad wrote:
| >"I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to
| get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over
| $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."
|
| is this really a valuable use of taxpayer money? sending a
| wireless link over a half-mile isn't that difficult, surely
| there's a better way to spend $60k of public money than
| delivering internet service to two families. especially now that
| starlink exists.
|
| i'm all in favour of scrappy upstart ISPs, but this just seems
| wasteful.
| lsllc wrote:
| You can do that with 2 Ubiquiti Nanobeams 5AC gen2's for $130
| each and get a ~650Mbps link (source, I've done this a number
| of times!).
| a2tech wrote:
| Especially since he's burying the lede about the people he's
| servicing--its true 'in general' that the area is lower income,
| but most of the homes he's serving will be millionaires.
| mrb wrote:
| " _I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to
| get to one house, " Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over
| $30,000 for each of those homes to get served._"
|
| That's over $11 per feet. That sounds about right. I paid $18 per
| feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed at
| one of my houses (in the US), going down a very long driveway,
| with 3 patch panels, 2 at each end and one in the middle at a
| gate. That was just for my LAN, not internet access. I needed the
| link to hook up intercoms and security cameras. I absolutely
| wanted 100% reliability of the network link, so wireless
| solutions wouldn't have been adequate. The previous homeowner had
| buried a cat5e line in the first 500 feet, with a cat5e repeater
| (underground), but its electronics failed after a couple years
| and its exact location couldn't be found. And he had not even put
| the cable in conduit.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| > 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month
|
| Wow, sign me up. Comcast, which has a monopoly on my market,
| charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps.
| nodunutshere992 wrote:
| Comcast charges $100/mo for 1Gbps where I'm at in a suburb of
| Salt Lake City. Our city announced a partnership with Google
| Fiber that will begin rolling out in 6-8 months. After that
| happened, I've started getting Comcast adverts to sign a 2 year
| contract...I also expect to see their prices start dropping
| soon.
| capableweb wrote:
| The costs for internet in the US still surprises me, how on
| earth can it be so expensive?! I understand some countries, but
| in the US, it seems high costs are because "because we can",
| not because it has to be like that.
|
| In comparison, you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in
| most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month. In some, you
| even get it for under $10/month (like Romania, which has
| surprisingly awesome internet infrastructure).
| r00fus wrote:
| This is what happens when your government regulatory agencies
| gets captured [1] by corporate interests.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| As much as I hate the high price where I live (Canada) I
| assume that Internet and wireless phone service is expensive
| because the country is so large that the build out cost is
| expensive. The USA is running 3/4 in the list of largest
| countries by land area and Canada is 2nd[1]. Maybe I'm naive
| in my thinking but I have family in a teeny tiny European
| country and they all have 1Gb fibre optic service for cheap-
| cheap.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depen
| den...
| qball wrote:
| >because the country is so large that the build out cost is
| expensive
|
| Nah, that's just their excuse; most of the country's
| population lives in urban areas and they don't even bother
| running fiber or setting up cell towers in more rural areas
| aside from maybe along the main highways.
|
| Remember, SaskTel (and MTS, before the government sold it
| to Bell) doesn't have a problem with charging reasonable
| rates or building out fiber (and turning a profit at the
| same time) and those are the lowest-density parts of the
| country. So no, the telcos aren't telling the truth.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Comcast has 189,000 employees who make US salaries. It costs
| a lot less to dig a trench in Romania than in Seattle.
|
| You can look at the profit margins. 11.3% for Comcast as of
| June 2022. That tells me they aren't simply collecting the
| difference between US and Romanian internet prices in profit.
|
| Of course, far be it from me to defend Comcast, but this is
| basically just the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP)
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'm gonna bet the Romanian ISP has fewer employees per
| subscriber and fewer employees per mile of fiber.
|
| Businesses without competition get fat.
| jrajav wrote:
| Costs of deployment and profit margins have nothing to do
| with it. The US public has subsidized the cost of broadband
| internet deployment since the very birth of the internet,
| and continues to do so like clockwork every few years.
| Private ISPs continue to caress the books to make it seem
| like they're barely operating at a profit and still need
| more, without ever having delivered on the last promise.
| Taxpayers have paid for fiber to every home a few times
| over at this point.
|
| http://irregulators.org/bookofbrokenpromises/
| Spivak wrote:
| The thing I can't really understand if this is the
| argument is where the money is actually going? With an on
| paper 11% profit margin it's certainly isn't
| shareholders, and even if the executives rake it would
| still be a blip in their total revenue.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Are those margins only on their broadband business? Comcast
| has other ventures as well.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Good question. I briefly looked into it and it seems they
| do break out the numbers for cable communications
| division (as well as media and entertainment) but I
| couldn't find a profit margin figure without opening the
| whole 10K and my calculator. Worth noting that the great
| majority of their business is cable communications.
|
| However, Charter Communications is a competitor that is
| more of a pure play and their margin is 10.8%
| rjbwork wrote:
| >The costs for internet in the US still surprises me, how on
| earth can it be so expensive?!
|
| Monopolies and regulatory capture. I can't get ANY wired ISP
| where I'm at. Even AT&T ADSL which was like .5Mbps and ~50%
| packet loss terminated service to our neighborhood, saying
| the copper is too degraded. Comcast, for some reason, told us
| that to wire the entire neighborhood would cost them $73000
| dollars, but they won't do it. That was 3 years ago. I'd have
| paid them 4000 dollars since then for business gigabit by
| now. I have been kicked off of multiple MVNO's (not for my
| abuse, but because AT&T/Verizon terminated their ability to
| sell SIMs for modem use).
|
| My only current option is T-Mobile's home internet service
| (via LTE/5g), which works well most of the time but has some
| pretty ridiculous outages at least once a week. I gave Elon
| my 100 bucks years ago when they said we'd have starlink
| available by EOY 2021. They're now saying Q3 2023.
|
| These ISP's have us over a barrel in the states.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries
| in Europe for under ~$30/month.
|
| I suspect that decisionmakers in the US think that symmetric
| connections encourage communism.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| On the more measurable side I would imagine the cost of lines
| correlates with population density. Running wires to 100
| single family homes is way more expensive than running the
| wires to a district of apartment buildings
| TeeMassive wrote:
| In Canada they refuse to capacity because some "cities are
| too dense"
| [deleted]
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Depends on how old the apartment buildings are. If the
| apartment buildings themselves are already wired with fiber
| (or really good, recent coax) it might be a lot cheaper
| running a single _bundle_ of wires to services the
| building. (Keep in mind that ideally you still have one
| fiber wire _per apartment_ to sell the highest speeds to
| each apartment, so you aren 't necessarily saving on number
| of cables for 100 apartments versus 100 detached single-
| family homes.)
|
| Of course, the older the buildings are the more expensive
| it gets. Running a new line into a single family home is
| usually a single new hole from the local utility trench or
| utility pole, which often have existing rights of way and
| known contact points to do utility work. Running new lines
| in an apartment complex often requires opening walls and
| ceilings between, among, and inside units, which then
| consequentially means doing new drywall and repainting (and
| maybe high costs to color match historic paints). If the
| apartments are condos there's even more complex rights of
| way issues in needing to get the consent of individual unit
| owners for some of the work.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| To be honest, I only have second-hand experience with
| running Internet lines in a bunch of Soviet-era apartment
| blocks. On a lot of building designs there's typically a
| drop going through all floors that exposes the
| electricity meters in a common area of the stairwell. The
| cable would go in either through the underground utility
| way - most likely electricity or heat lines (central
| heating FTW) or by air from a neighboring house. There
| would be a switch in the attic where the connections from
| apartments would terminate.
| jer0me wrote:
| 1Gbps is $40/mo from Sonic in the Bay Area
| Tsukiortu wrote:
| I only can use Windstream as the other providers are right on
| the edge of my area and refuse to move in. I only get "50Mbps"
| (It's never gone above 45) for $90+ a month, and they have been
| forever increasing it because well, what choice do we have.
| colechristensen wrote:
| https://usinternet.com/fiber/plans-pricing/
|
| Come to Minneapolis. 1 Gbps for $70.
| IE6 wrote:
| > charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps
|
| And, in my experience, they will slowly ratchet up the cost
| until you call in and complain or change your plan, so a
| negotiated 80 dollars slowly can become 160+
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I use a smaller ISP in Washington state and my 1G symmetrical
| line just went from $79 to $59 a month and they increased my
| upload, it used to not be symmetrical.
| sizzle wrote:
| Love all these underdog stories
| woah wrote:
| This is kind of an interesting illustration of how little people
| know about how the internet works, and how news is ultimately
| entertainment.
|
| Full respect to the man in the article for the hard work and
| initiative he took in starting a small independent ISP, but this
| story is the story of thousands of small ISPs in the US and many
| more around the world.
|
| In a basic sense, this story is not "newsworthy" since there is
| nothing new about it. It's more of a human interest piece, like
| if the reporter wrote a story about the lady who started a coffee
| shop after being overcharged for a Frappuccino.
|
| I'm guessing this ISP has gotten more attention here and on Ars
| Technica than others because the founder is fluent in the
| software engineering world, as well as having started an ISP.
| Ironically there is a pretty big gulf between the world of
| techies who know how to write the code on the internet and the
| people who actually build the internet who are more blue collar.
| Spivak wrote:
| One of my coworkers also did this but went the cell tower
| route. Had no idea you could just install a cell tower without
| mountains of red tape and huge expense but hey. Then all his
| "customers" (i.e neighbors) have antennas on their house
| pointed right at it and boom, internet. He only had to front
| the cost of getting the lines run to one location.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| Is he running the tower as a business?
| hinkley wrote:
| I knew a couple who did similar in Seattle. They all got gobbled
| up one by one, sometimes by Speakeasy, who in turn was gobbled up
| by others. Briefly theirs was owned by an east coast company
| which sucked because they had east coast tech support. If your
| internet went down binge watching a show at 9 pm you were done
| for the evening because their people were in bed.
|
| I would not recommend doing this business with a spouse. They did
| not make it for many reasons, but running a 24/7 interest sped up
| all of their problems. Not unlike a vacation that is going
| poorly, but every month.
|
| Also fuck Covad. They only had to suck less than Centurylink nee
| Qwest and they couldn't manage that.
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