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Getting Fiber to My Town [video]
- jdashg 6y agoThis is a 34 minute video with 500 views and no description, and no transcript.
- recursive 6y agoTrue, there's no way I would have found this without the link from HN. Thanks!
- bbunix 6y agoAn engineer vs a sales guy
- jaredmauch 6y agoI had to be both.
- alyx 6y agoTLDR; - Guy wants faster internet but doesn't want to move because moving means paying sales commission - Guy starts ISP and lays fiber, incurring +$126K expenses, now has fast internet
- jaredmauch 6y ago150k or so 126+ was in 2020
- nocman 6y agoWow. All I can think is WELL DONE Jared! I can't imagine taking all of that on if someone else was paying for it, let alone financing so much of it yourself -- not to mention all the sweat equity you obviously put into it. So many people in the States have little to no choices on ISPs. Your story is very inspring and encouraging. I hope you continue to reap the rewards of your hard work for many years to come.
- est31 6y agoOn youtube, you can click on the ... and click the "open transcript" link to access an auto generated transcript. Haven't checked the transcript of this video, but in general they've become quite good over the years.
- janvdberg 6y agoThis is a presentation by Jared Mauch of how he managed to dig and build his own fiber network in his town without help of big telcos. He shares his lessons learned (if you feel inclined to build your own) and details his expenses (it's not cheap, but not impossible either). It's a very informative and fun talk!
- hn_check 6y agoMr. Mauch is replying through this thread and I don't think many have noticed. Great initiative and project, with a wonderful outcome. This is great HN material.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jaredmauch 6y agoyeah, i had to recover my HN account, i forgot i made one
- xur17 6y agoJust watched most of the video, and holy crap, this is super cool. Jared got frustrated by the (very slow) internet options available to him, and started his own isp to solve the problem for him and his neighbors.
- grahamburger 6y agoThere are some Facebook groups around with folks doing this kind of thing. The one I follow is "WISPs turned FISPs" with lots of folks building FTTH networks on small scales. (not sure how to link directly to a FB group.) Also shameless plug for my website startyourownisp.com which has a similar theme.
- non-entity 6y agoCool sutff, I wish I had the capital to do something like this. Although given how hard the existing ISPs are fighting against municipal internet here I wonder how I'd fare.
- grahamburger 6y agoIME it's rarely (if ever) pushback from incumbents that kills a small ISP. Generally it's all the same kinds of things that any other business struggles with - making your product something people actually want, letting people know it's available, finding the right employees, etc.
- jaredmauch 6y agoLocal regulatory barriers exist and if you aren't persistent you can't overcome them. There were many times where I wondered if it was a bad idea or .. what am I doing here. Being a telephone company made it easier to permit and working with the groups to permit it became possible.
- jaredmauch 6y agoI mentioned these groups in the slides. You can find those slides on the NLNOG website. https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf
- buildbuildbuild 6y agoWhere did you end up running the fiber to, and how did you find out about this nearest connection point? Thank you for sharing your experience, very inspiring.
- interrupt_ 6y agoHere in my 3rd world country, fiber is getting pretty common. Small ISPs just rent space on poles and lay the fiber to the extend that I can choose from 4 different fiber ISPs in my home. It amazes me how difficult it seems to get the same in more developed places like US/Canada.
- jpollock 6y agoThe incumbents own the poles, which means they set the price and determine who gets access. That prevents new entrants.
- jaredmauch 6y agoBeing on the poles can be more expensive than underground. Trees, cars and even bullets can damage the wiring. Underground is more expensive to start with but cheaper long term.
- AlphaSite 6y agoUnderground has a bunch of other issues as well, in the UK all records of the underground ducting have been lost in many areas in the 50-70 years since it was installed, which makes it a big headache. Which makes fixing, replacing etc quite expensive and the quality can be suspect.
- sonicggg 6y agoHow dense is your country though? I feel that having fiber in big cities is a given nowadays. I don't think telcos have any plan on supporting those smaller remote towns with fiber. Maybe investment does not pay off in a reasonable amount of time. Fiber may not be the only option though. Starlink should be becoming available soon in North America. Only time will tell if that will work out though. WiMax, for example, was a failed hard.
- cactus2093 6y agoIt's definitely not a given even in big cities. In San Francisco the only places I've seen it offered are big apartment buildings with 50+ units. At least from what I've seen, even in pretty dense parts of the cities if you're in a small apartment building with like 10 units or you're in a duplex or attached SFH you can't get fiber service. The upside is we can still get gigabit service over cable lines through comcast for a fairly reasonable price (although with terrible upload speeds, data caps on the plan, and the need to fight with support every year to prevent your price from going up, as with all comcast plans).
- whatever1 6y agoIgnorant questions: 1) He showed that he can achieve 700ish Mbit/s at his place. Does it mean that the 20 subscribers of his service are sharing this? If he wants to increase the overall throughput does he have to place more fiber cables? 2) Did he use any sort of repeaters to deal with the attenuation of the signal?
- mayoff 6y agoI believe he said he's paying for 1.5 Gbps capacity over a 10 Gbps uplink (though it's currently only set at 1 Gbps and needs to be fixed). So the maximum shared bandwidth is 1.5 Gbps, but he has physical headroom if he needs more.
- jaredmauch 6y agoOptic swap to the 10G was today. I won't disclose what the usage is but with everyone live there is tons of headroom. The redundant carrier and construction is underway as well.
- calmoo 6y agoGreat talk, enjoyed it immensely. Say you wanted to increase the bandwidth of the line, would this simply be a matter of running the another length of fiber through the existing conduit?
- jaredmauch 6y agoOr swapping the optics. Today they swapped from the 1G to 10G. I can use other strands or run them in the second conduit we installed.
- jjeaff 6y agoI have read that you can put hundreds of people on a single gigabit backhaul and give gigabit to all of them and you will rarely run into problems.
- jaredmauch 6y agoHere's the slides https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf
- albertop 6y agoDepressing part: - Permit filed for April 2019 - Issued September 2019
- jaredmauch 6y agoThere are many parts that posed challenges. At the height of covid lockdowns - talking to contractor about if they will start at all was a big decision. Thankfully they were a family business and the work is outdoors in a rural setting so lower risk.
- wyclif 6y agoI asked this question in a thread on a different story, then when I saw this thread I immediately thought you would be the perfect person to ask this question: Have you ever found a way to correlate or list rural areas in the USA that already have high-speed FTTH? A lot of people here would be interested in that information, since they plan to move out of big 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tier cities and will be working from home indefinitely.
- iptrans 6y agoVery few ISPs publish service area maps, never mind accurate coverage maps. The only public data about broadband availability is based on FCC 477 forms, which is notoriously inaccurate. It's so bad that the FCC recently had to walk back claims of broadband coverage for 63 million households. The FCC data is so terrible that you can only use it to rule out coverage areas. To get any kind of reliable data you'd have to manually try to collect information scattered all over the web. Go over ISP websites, the list of muni broadband networks, carrier portals,... Even so, ISPs can and will readily deny service, even if they at first say that there is coverage. The only way to make sure is to order service and see if they deliver. If you have the budget for it, you could consider using commercial services like Fiberlocator, but they mainly cater for the commercial and wholesale markets. I don't know if they cover FTTH. They may, if the network in question also offers business service. They have an API, but that's probably not included in the yearly subscription fee of just under four grand.
- notJim 6y agoIt took over a year for my mom to get cable at her house. Never occurred to me to start my own ISP instead.
- coronadisaster 6y agoit took him like 10 years to get his fiber ISP going and still can't get cable
- tantalor 6y agoSkip the first 40 seconds.
- rmason 6y agoA few years back I knew a guy who built a network for a few neighbors South of Ann Arbor. I was on some discussion group and just coincidentally CmdrTaco was complaining about his poor internet access South of Ann Arbor. Chimed in to provide an introduction to my friend and together they expanded the network. Wish East Lansing had all the independent efforts that Ann Arbor does. Been trying to get fiber here for ten years, none of the local providers will come out to the suburbs ;<(.
- jaredmauch 6y agoHah. My kid goes to school with CmdrTacos kid. His old house was not very accessible. Lightspeed - I forget who bought them maybe MEC. Try them
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago5G home internet should make this a thing of the past, shouldn't it?
- vasilia 6y agoYes and no. If you are living near base station in a big city it will work. But in the countryside where no good connection from ISP equipment to the base station the bottleneck will be this link. Furthermore, 5G uses a higher frequency than LTE, it could be not cost-effective to cover remote regions with small number of users. Starlink could solve problems with cables, but adds problems with RTT. Maybe one day all FAANG companies will open data centres on Earth orbit.
- ericd 6y agoWhat problems with RTT does Starlink add?
- vasilia 6y agoThe signal goes through the ionosphere to the satellite than to another satellite which has a link to the Earth. Starlink uses LEO, so there is 2400 km link(1200 km from/to the ground). 1 ms is time for the signal to travel for 300 km in a vacuum. So theoretically the lowest RTT could be about 8 ms. Right now RTT to my ISP is 2 ms.
- ericd 6y agoI think your altitude figure is off by ~2x. "The satellites successfully reached their operational altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers)" according to this: https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
- vasilia 6y agoI found this https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_confirmed_starlink_speed_tests/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/i9w09n/list_of_co... It's pretty good for far remote regions like Alaska. Fibre channel will be much more costly with comparable RTT.
- flas9sd 6y agoin the video Jared said he's 25 years in the industry. This being nlnog, I guess in networking, one layer above the physical? good mechanical engineering skills also helped with building an diy conduit blower for the fibre cables. The thing I most wonder about if you start to be a service provider and need to provide ongoing connectivity - you need a backup plan for when you're out of town.
- cnst 6y agoAnd he didn't actually reply to the question on how much of his own time he has spent doing all of this. It's impressive, but, at the same time, I'd imagine it's way too stressful to run by yourself in a small town like that. Without really that much payout, money-wise.
- jaredmauch 6y agotoo much time.. the payback is actually reasonable (under 4 years)
- cnst 6y agoAre you saying you're going to recoup the value of your time in under 4 years, or would you just recoup the initial non-time investment in under 4 years? It may sound like you might be spending something around 20 hours per week on this, if not more. If you bill your own time to your new ISP at market rate, when will you recoup the investment? Is that still 4 years? To put some math into perspective, (20 hours/week * 4 weeks/month * 100 USD/hour) / 50 USD/month/customer = 160 customers -- that's how many customers you need to cover just your time alone, without considering any other expenses. The math should definitely work out given an adequate intake, but I think it's also easy to get lost in the community and tech part of it, forgetting the business case. Especially if you live in the middle of nowhere, without that many neighbours to sign up.
- iptrans 6y agoEven if Jared is spending 20 hours per week on this project now, that will not be the case after construction is finished. As such your calculation does not hold and 160 customers will not be needed to recoup costs, cash or non-cash. There need only be enough customers to cover running expenses, administration costs and once off investment costs over time.
- walrus01 6y agoFor people who don't know who Jared Mauch is, he's a senior network engineer at Akamai. https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=jared+mauch+akamai https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=jared+mauch+akama... So this is not a case of somebody who had more enthusiasm than experience attempting to do a rural broadband project. This sort of thing does crop up commonly in attempts at rural WISP projects, where somebody who's never had 'enable' on the routers of any ASN decides to build their own ISP. In this case it's somebody with the great depth and breadth of knowledge to do it, dissatisfied with their local status quo for residential last mile service, deciding to implement it themselves.
- justaj 6y agoHow much of this presentation could be applicable outside of the US? As in: How much of this is general knowledge that you can apply if you're trying to achieve the same goal and happen to be situated outside of the US?
- iptrans 6y agoIt's pretty accurate across borders. Local regulations and permitting rules will differ and costs will vary according to local labor costs. Souce: done that, been there in multiple countries Hit me up via email if you need help. Email in profile.
- jordan801 6y agoThis is inspiring. Its amazing that he was able to bust this out for his community. Its mind blowing the amount of perserverance. I really want to break free from my job and build something of my own. Like this. Really inspiring to see someone that had a metaphorical mountain between them and a goal, push through. I cant imagine anything I will be doing, will be nearly as problem ridden as this project. Shows what confronting one problem at a time, and not giving up, can result in.
- noisy_boy 6y agoI basically don't know much about the nitty gritty of network engineering but this was very satisfying to watch. Especially the anecdote he shared of a customer going "holly, molly" after he started using this service. Very nice.
- ckdarby 6y ago@jaredmauch Would you still have considered doing this today with Starlink now happening? I stopped the video once the interviewer portion started but how does someone justify $125-150k investment to become an ISP? I'd maybe consider this if I owned a large chunk of land out there and planned to sell it and then sell the internet subscriptions to individuals who build there.
- jaredmauch 6y agoyes, because i have fiber and starlink is going to be great for people who are 1 home per square mile or less in Montana etc.. I'm also in a position to offer much higher speeds when I need to upgrade. Projections put that out after month 60 when I need more bandwidth.
- gonesilent 6y agoI'm attempting the same thing in red bluff California. Forced to start my own ISP because the other service options suck. Got on a zayo ila site and now it's time to learn how to dig fiber.
- philjohn 6y agoAlso worth mentioning a huge success story in the UK along similar lines - B4RN https://b4rn.org.uk/ https://b4rn.org.uk/ Their secret sauce was getting farmers to dig trenches for fibre conduits across their farmland, in return for getting the service.
- iptrans 6y ago@jaredmauch How much of the route did you bore with that Ditch Witch JT820 drill? Did you personally run the machine or did you have a contractor do it for you? What's your view on the JT820? Any problems? Or did all go well?
- jaredmauch 6y agoI ran short distances (like my private road, or driveway crossings/private property runs under trees) with it. It has a reach of around 150-200' and is not suitable for a large project like mine that was 12-14k feet. It's a great little drill, but I've also spent a fair amount on parts and pieces to keep it running. Nothing too expensive (except the rubber tracks, those are around $500 to replace, did one in 2019 and the other in 2020). I purchased a new locate wand as well, which was over 5k which works better with the beacon than the older one. If you need to go a short distance it's a good tool, small enough i can move it with a F250.
- iptrans 6y agoWhich locate wand did you get?
- jaredmauch 6y agoI purchased a tk recon 2
- xyst 6y agoInteresting, he was able to subsidize nearly 67% of the $126,710 through the 17 pre-orders he received. Probably could have built the entire project with zero out of pocket expenses if it was a more dense area (or at least had a higher signup rate than 30%). Although, now that it is built what’s the process for hooking up new subscribers? Wouldn’t he have to hire more contractors to bore out lines and hook up the fiber to each home? The cost of acquiring a customer would appear to be astronomical.
- iptrans 6y agoAccording to the presentation: - Costs exceeded $126k by far. More like $150k in direct costs plus all the free labor Jared put in. This project has taken literally years of his life and all his spare time lately. - Pre-orders were more than 17. 17 is the number of subscribers already hooked up. - Take rate wasn't 30%, it was 70% along the route. - Customers were, at least partially, pre-installed, so not all will require new construction. Jared also does a lot of the work himself without contractors. He also owns/has access to a chain trencher and a directional bore. - customer acquisition costs do not traditionally factor in the cost of building drops. These are usually accounted for separately. Obviously construction costs time and/or money.
- iptrans 6y ago@jaredmauch Can you share more details on becoming a telco? Did it have other upsides/downsides than easier access to the public right of way? Does being a CLEC have benefits not extended to a BIAS (Broadband Internet Access Provider) as defined by the FCC?
- treesknees 6y agoWhat happens when Jared sells his home or has to move? Everyone has fiber wired into his basement for connectivity. Would the new homeowner be obligated to continue running this? Personally if I were a neighbor I'd still sign up with this risk given the ISP options available, but would still be a concern. Your Internet service and home value depend on this guy keeping things running "forever".
- toomuchtodo 6y agoMost likely, the equipment would move to a community owned and maintained equipment enclosure/shed. This is a worn path for coops and other endeavors like this where residents go in to buy a DSL DSLAM and pull fiber to it, with the "last mile" being copper runs.
- jaredmauch 6y agoIt's pretty easy, I just sell myself an easement on the property for $1 before I sell to someone else. I can also just move the electronics somewhere else. The nice thing about fiber is the range, I can be within 25dB of here and it will still work. With average loss of 0.5dB/km that gives you a decent range
- anthony_barker 6y agoreally interesting video... loved it.
- effnorwood 6y agoMetamucil is available most any place. Your welcome.