OT: Last mile, yeah. I've worked in one startup ISP (forked from a large company but started from scratch; our CEO was an ex-CEO of the other telco). Started sm

OT: Last mile, yeah. I've worked in one startup ISP (forked from a large company but started from scratch; our CEO was an ex-CEO of the other telco). Started small, with just a few households, and gradually grew to cover almost the whole city except for some hard-to-reach areas and far suburbs (city's Veliky Novgorod, 200k population; 90km²/35mi² area; about 200km/125mi from St. Petersburg). There were also companies that had last mile fiber but offered other ISPs to use that fiber to provide actual Internet connectivity. I think it started that way because one larger ISP wanted to split into few smaller companies for tax purposes, but not sure. We (and other our competitors) bought upstream bandwidth from higher-tier providers and covered the city with our own fiber. I don't think anyone (except for one large telco that's now a part of Rostelekom) got or had tried to get their lines to an IX in e.g. St.Petersburg. There was some choice in higher-tier providers. We had 3 different uplinks and there were still at least pair of more options available that I've heard of. Maybe more, I don't know. Negotiating price downs ("hey, that other company said can give us a better offer") was quite common, I think I heard that every year or another. I've worked on software components (website, various network services, software network access servers), though and wasn't deep into peering agreements and physical network building stuff.