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> Actual ISP network engineer her So then you must intimately understand the depth of the lies and anti-consumer business practices that spur such networks. >

> Actual ISP network engineer her So then you must intimately understand the depth of the lies and anti-consumer business practices that spur such networks. > Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment. 5-9s is 5 minutes of downtime a year. I've never had a commercial, let alone residential ISP hit that mark. > Actual, reliable internet costs real money, both in the salaries of people to engineer and architect it, salaries for 24x7x365 clued-in NOC staff, equipment, salaries and expenses for field technicians to build it. ... Going back to my first point, almost no one is unwilling to pay for their internet connection. They're unwilling to pay less to get TV service they have no use for and internet than they are internet alone. They're unwilling to look at the cost of network access in other countries and be happy when comparing that to the cost of internet in a major, densely populated area in the US. They're unwilling to accept transfer caps and accept the lies they they help the network by making people share when they know that transfer is irrelevant and bandwidth is the limited commodity. They're unwilling to accept lies of bandwidth speed that isn't attainable even under the best of conditions. They're unwilling to accept shady and underhanded business practices such as random, "accidental" charges. > It just needs to be channeled the right way so that they can figure out what it actually costs to run a reliable ISP. I'm all in favor of new startup ISPs. However, as an "actual ISP network engineer", you must understand the (very arguably unfair) regulatory issues that the big players have put in place to make this impossible to do. Google failed at starting an ISP, and it's not like they are tight on either cash or lawyers.

rayiner 9y ago
Do you have any experience with either ISP level network engineering or regulation? Because you speak awfully authoritatively.
adrianN 9y ago
I'm no network engineer, but when you have a large network with lots of equipment, you want the individual components to have a couple more nines than the resulting network. Maybe that's what they meant.
walrus01 9y ago
Google did not fail at starting an ISP. They decided that the ROI for doing individual residential home FTTH was not worth it, considering the cost per house passed. Then they went and bought Webpass, which has a totally different condo/apartment based business model, which has been wildly successful. Starting a small ISP based out of extreme dissatisfaction with huge, evil incumbents is something that I encourage any plucky upstart to do. If you don't like Comcast, Charter, RCN, etc, if you have sufficient clue, go do it yourself. Just don't try to do it with $20,000 and some good wishes, because something with much deeper pockets like Webpass will come along and obliterate you. The point that I am rather bluntly trying to get across to these folks is that if they're going to invest significant amounts of their personal time/engineering resources into it (unpaid labor?), that they should treat it like a serious business and not a nonprofit. Raise sufficient funds, somewhere in the $500,000+ range to start, to build a network that actually does meet five nines through sufficient diversity in topology and routing. Compared to random YC companies that seem to raise $1m to $5m to do some vaguely defined web2.0 SAAS thing, the amount of money that a group of people need to raise to build the core of a serious ISP is not huge. Elsewhere in this thread I threw out a figure like $750,000 in beginning CapEx if they're serious. For some good reasons, however, it's easier to get $5m of series A funding from a VC for a pure software development business than a wholly-owned-facilities-based startup ISP. Even if you completely ignore things like colocation costs, IP transit costs, IX/peering costs, office rental, office utilities and overhead, running a serious ISP with live, clued in humans watching the network takes a lot of money per year for salaries. 3 to 5 NOC persons for 24x7x365 NOC phone coverage. At a certain point if you peer with the big boy ASNs they will expect a live human to answer the phone at 3am when something unusual happens in traffic between your mutual networks. That live human needs to be somebody who has the equivalent of 'enable' on your peering router and sufficient clue to wield it. 2 network engineering/architecture positions, multiply by expected fully loaded yearly salary and benefits package for each person. at least 2 field technicians vehicles, vehicle insurance, tools for technicians At NYC salaries? In a greenfield scenario, I could easily spend $900,000 a year in just payroll and benefits, just to begin to attempt to duplicate what some other serious ISPs already have in place for manpower. And again that is before you spend one dollar on equipment.
- dzonga 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
It’s pretty hilarious to hear a cable network engineer get on a soapbox about reliability. As an enterprise customer, I only get 99% commitment, and frequently get credits. They’ve improved it in the last 5 years, but our whole region had an outage when the single fiber connecting to their core routers was cut by a house fire.

rayiner 9y ago

Do you have any experience with either ISP level network engineering or regulation? Because you speak awfully authoritatively.

adrianN 9y ago

I'm no network engineer, but when you have a large network with lots of equipment, you want the individual components to have a couple more nines than the resulting network. Maybe that's what they meant.

walrus01 9y ago

Google did not fail at starting an ISP. They decided that the ROI for doing individual residential home FTTH was not worth it, considering the cost per house passed. Then they went and bought Webpass, which has a totally different condo/apartment based business model, which has been wildly successful. Starting a small ISP based out of extreme dissatisfaction with huge, evil incumbents is something that I encourage any plucky upstart to do. If you don't like Comcast, Charter, RCN, etc, if you have sufficient clue, go do it yourself. Just don't try to do it with $20,000 and some good wishes, because something with much deeper pockets like Webpass will come along and obliterate you. The point that I am rather bluntly trying to get across to these folks is that if they're going to invest significant amounts of their personal time/engineering resources into it (unpaid labor?), that they should treat it like a serious business and not a nonprofit. Raise sufficient funds, somewhere in the $500,000+ range to start, to build a network that actually does meet five nines through sufficient diversity in topology and routing. Compared to random YC companies that seem to raise $1m to $5m to do some vaguely defined web2.0 SAAS thing, the amount of money that a group of people need to raise to build the core of a serious ISP is not huge. Elsewhere in this thread I threw out a figure like $750,000 in beginning CapEx if they're serious. For some good reasons, however, it's easier to get $5m of series A funding from a VC for a pure software development business than a wholly-owned-facilities-based startup ISP. Even if you completely ignore things like colocation costs, IP transit costs, IX/peering costs, office rental, office utilities and overhead, running a serious ISP with live, clued in humans watching the network takes a lot of money per year for salaries. 3 to 5 NOC persons for 24x7x365 NOC phone coverage. At a certain point if you peer with the big boy ASNs they will expect a live human to answer the phone at 3am when something unusual happens in traffic between your mutual networks. That live human needs to be somebody who has the equivalent of 'enable' on your peering router and sufficient clue to wield it. 2 network engineering/architecture positions, multiply by expected fully loaded yearly salary and benefits package for each person. at least 2 field technicians vehicles, vehicle insurance, tools for technicians At NYC salaries? In a greenfield scenario, I could easily spend $900,000 a year in just payroll and benefits, just to begin to attempt to duplicate what some other serious ISPs already have in place for manpower. And again that is before you spend one dollar on equipment.

dzonga 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

It’s pretty hilarious to hear a cable network engineer get on a soapbox about reliability. As an enterprise customer, I only get 99% commitment, and frequently get credits. They’ve improved it in the last 5 years, but our whole region had an outage when the single fiber connecting to their core routers was cut by a house fire.