30 ms·

Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

• qwe----3 4y ago
  > over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
  • adrr 4y ago
    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.
  • rvnx 4y ago
    To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes
    • deelowe 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
        • tyen_ 4y ago
          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.
          • rvnx 4y ago
            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 4y ago
              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 4y ago
              That sounds like it would bring even more political divisiveness and injustice to the US.
          • Consultant32452 4y ago
            Yes.
            • InitialLastName 4y ago
              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 4y ago
                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.
      • TulliusCicero 4y ago
        As a general principle it's fine. The issue is a combination of: * Providing infrastructure and services for rural areas like this is inherently monumentally expensive. * For most people, rural living is some kind of choice: most could likely move to a cheap suburb that could be served much more easily, but don't want to. * Far from having more money to fund things like this, rural areas are actually much less economically productive per person, on average. Of course you need some people to farm, but in practice you have many more people than that. Essentially, society is providing a heavy subsidy for a lifestyle choice for most people, with no compelling government interest there. While I do think we should make a goal of hooking everyone up to decent internet, any sensible plan has to look at how we can do this efficiently. Absolutely bare minimum, we should be superceding local zoning laws and similar that often make it illegal for people to build more densely in these areas (small town city centers), such that people can individually choose to live in a more efficient way in the same general area if they want. Not talking about skyscrapers obviously, but traditional, walkable downtowns with townhomes or duplexes would be a great thing. Some Americans may scoff at this, but you don't need large numbers of people to get walkable neighborhoods. I've been through Bavarian villages of a few hundred people that were more walkable than US cities 100x their size. It's especially nonsensical that we'd heavily subsidize super low density living when that's basically always gonna be worse for the environment. It means you need much more land per person, obviously, so you gotta cut into nature more, plus higher energy requirements.
    • basilgohar 4y ago
      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 https://newnetworks.com/bookofbrokenpromises.htm
    • toss1 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
    • failrate 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        >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 4y ago
          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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • sgerenser 4y ago
    Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.
    • philote 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
  • throwaway787544 4y ago
    .....have you ever dug fiber in Michigan?
  • fourthark 4y ago
    At $55/mo, he'll start making a profit in 45 years.
    • TrueGeek 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        That bill and these types of projects are basically why we have 10% inflation now.
        • LetsGetTechnicl 4y ago
          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_ 4y ago
            Right, in the middle of war with Russia and with war with China on the horizon. Great idea.
            • themoonisachees 4y ago
              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 4y ago
  • toast0 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 $$$.
      • alistairSH 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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.
  • omvtam 4y ago
    You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric company.
    • dboreham 4y ago
      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.
  • bodfinch 4y ago
    Same sentiment here. Maybe he could look into some WAN to CPE connections from the fibre terminations
  • burntsushi 4y ago
    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.
    • brianwawok 4y ago
      You get bigger machines, which do work faster.
      • fragmede 4y ago
        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.
        • brianwawok 4y ago
          Only a foot deep? My sprinkler system is deeper than that. ATT recently did fiber by my house with some kind of machine. It did some kind of U shaped trench, where it drilled down (not sure how deep), then over about 200 feet, and back up. So you only see a hole every 200 or so feet, vs a solid trench. Let them go under driveways and all of that. A team of 4 guys was able to do my entire neighborhood in a day. Still waiting for ATT to actually wire up the fiber, until them I am stuck with comcast cable (which is fine ,except the data cap doesn't scale with speed, so the faster connections cap cap you out in like 15 minutes).
    • strken 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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.
  • Vaslo 4y ago
    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.
  • inopinatus 4y ago
    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.
  • rasz 4y ago
    Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-) >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. Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
• bluedino 4y ago
  > 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!
  • dkhenry 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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/comcast-reports-2nd-quarter-2022-results https://www.cmcsa.com/news-releases/news-release-details/com...
        • dr-detroit 4y ago
  • criddell 4y ago
    > 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.
• Octoth0rpe 4y ago
  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.
  • bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
    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 https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
    • tailspin2019 4y ago
      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 https://feedbin.com
      • ev1 4y ago
        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.
  • kloch 4y ago
    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|assigned|66e25d155d3f3d57ff208733b59f8cc8 20220607|arin|US|asn|889|1|assigned|5b048aafff56a02f895e68ac5188853b 20220607|arin|US|asn|890|1|assigned|708d3f11915973323c76a5f95fa2d775 20220607|arin|US|asn|891|1|assigned|ab9bfca0becd32b7fe44c7ea0ba1aac3 20220607|arin|US|asn|892|1|assigned|0b9118a23862aab1647fd26939f7b219 20220607|arin|US|asn|893|1|assigned|57d59e6dfd1cd07523724f9cf5fc572b 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 https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)
• samwhiteUK 4y ago
  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?
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    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/ https://startyourownisp.com/
    • dataflow 4y ago
      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?
      • haunter 4y ago
        It's the 2nd step https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/ 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.html https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-internet... https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-internet https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-intern... https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-dedicated/ https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-...
        • dataflow 4y ago
          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?
• jtap 4y ago
  He presented at an online nanog event. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo I did enjoy listening.
  • kloch 4y ago
    Jared has been participating in Nanog since forever. I have always looked up to him as a top-tier engineer.
  • slim 4y ago
    is he visually impaired? I'm asking because he's presenting using slides including pictures
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952040 Slides from Jared’s talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayOZIWoaFEd6xWtd7EFT0P3bbk/mobilepresent?slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayO...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• vlunkr 4y ago
  Anyone else amused by the title? To me it reads as “Man […] expands to hundreds of homes.”
  • d23 4y ago
    I suppose that's impressive too!
• brentm 4y ago
  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_ 4y ago
    If I were really rich, I would spend a gigantic amount of money for the sole purpose of fucking over Comcast.
    • antonymy 4y ago
      Amen.
  • failrate 4y ago
    It is government subsidized. He just wanted good internet in the area.
    • criddell 4y ago
      Is there any internet in the US that isn't subsidized?
  • wollsmoth 4y ago
    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.
  • pwinnski 4y ago
    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.
• andrewallbright 4y ago
  ...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.
  • jononomo 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
      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.
• dr-detroit 4y ago
• bannedbybros 4y ago
• atentaten 4y ago
  Is he connecting to a backbone or to another ISP?
  • woah 4y ago
    The "backbone" is made up of other ISPs
    • tomjakubowski 4y ago
      That's right, a backbone is made up of ISPs: individual spine pieces, or vertebrae.
• tryptophan 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  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.
• guywithahat 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said. The world is full of small businesses doing good work in exchange for pay. theVC bubble isn't everything.
    • fragmede 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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)
• jquery 4y ago
  Meanwhile I live in San Francisco and I still can’t get affordable symmetric gigabit fiber internet to my home.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    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.
    • jquery 4y ago
      Yeah. A couple blocks away Sonic has wired up the entire neighborhood. I've been begging them to wire up my street for years with no luck. I used to be a customer but switched to Monkeybrains because I couldn't take dsl speeds any longer. Monkeybrains is my favorite ISP, I currently use them. Affordable and reliable. A couple hiccups over the past few years (my internet speed was cut by 80-90% for a day or two) but resolved with a phone call. Nothing so bad as Comcast regularly becoming nigh-unusable at peak times.
  • CliffStoll 4y ago
    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!
  • Ancapistani 4y ago
    That's nuts to me. I live in a town of ~15k people in a Southern state, and I have symmetric gigabit. Granted, I pay ~$110/mo, but I have the option of symmetric 300Mbps for ~$50/mo. Neither plan has a data cap. Then again, I chose my home based on the local ISPs' physical network topology. I didn't rely on their service maps, either - I physically went to their installation folks and got a copy of their maps.
    • jquery 4y ago
• H1Supreme 4y ago
  > 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.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    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).
    • VTimofeenko 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        In Canada they refuse to capacity because some "cities are too dense"
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • WorldMaker 4y ago
        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.
• jleahy 4y ago
  My wife did this, about 6 months of digging up roads in central London. Would recommend. AMA.
  • moritonal 4y ago
    As a fellow Londerer please please expand on this. Like, why, what were the returns, what'd you peer into?
    • jleahy 4y ago
      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.
  • KingFelix 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/hampstead-fibre
  • tinfever 4y ago
    How did you meet your wife with an ASN? Asking for a friend...
    • jleahy 4y ago
• sizzle 4y ago
  Love all these underdog stories
• boplicity 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    Has a road or water line ever paid for itself?
    • colechristensen 4y ago
      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.
  • jrajav 4y ago
    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?
    • asiachick 4y ago
      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.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  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.
  • margarina72 4y ago
    Not everything need to scale. A good way to handle this kind of project is keep it at a certain community size, and if people want in, beyond a certain threshold, they need to build their own. This is how federated internet providers work usually.
  • kalleboo 4y ago
    There are lots of ISPs that don’t suck
    • samstave 4y ago
      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.
• wdb 4y ago
  Maybe I should consider doing the same for the Mews houses in Westminster :)
• hinkley 4y ago
  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 nėe Qwest and they couldn’t manage that.
• markandrewj 4y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/ASXJgvy3mEg
• tikiman163 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
• notatoad 4y ago
  >"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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
    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.
    • TheMiller 4y ago
      Washtenaw is certainly an affluent county, but not that rich. I live in another part of the county and used to work in Mauch's part of it; it's by no means mostly millionaires. I think the simplicity of the project's goal -- every household served, no exceptions -- is one of the reasons that it got off the ground.
    • notatoad 4y ago
      without knowing specifics, that's kinda what i assumed. i see the same thing near where i live - the "low income rural areas" that get infrastructure subsidies is cottage country or areas with a lot of retirees who've moved to the country. the actual low income people living in rural areas have to move to a suburb or a trailer park if their region isn't serviced by a utility, they don't get assistance like this.
• woah 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Is he running the tower as a business?
• basedgod 4y ago
  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
• mrb 4y ago
  "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.
  • zy0n911 4y ago
    You mean "foot" instead of "feet" here surely?
    • leoqa 4y ago
      No he paid it twice, so it’s feet
  • system2 4y ago
    > I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed Are you saying you paid $18,000 for fiber optic installation at your house?
    • mrb 4y ago
      Yes
      • system2 4y ago
        Wasn't Cat6 or Cat7 enough? Do you think it was worth spending that much for fiber at home? Also, do you have any problems with the connectivity or damages? If it is damaged, can you fix it yourself?
• the_optimist 4y ago
  Average cost of ~ $40k per connection to the government. How is this better than Starlink?
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    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.
• xhrpost 4y ago
  > "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.
• zzzeek 4y ago
  > 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???
  • aisengard 4y ago
    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.
  • xupybd 4y ago
    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.
    • zzzeek 4y ago
      ah you're right, I had misinterpreted, thinking that he got a grant from the government for the public good, i missed that he just won a contract with them. my comment was based on my misconception that the government was subsidizing him as a public utility. my comment is past the delete button so that's that.
  • bell-cot 4y ago
    > 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?
• contingencies 4y ago
  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.
• ncmncm 4y ago
  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,)
• hasmanean 4y ago
  If you had a small robot that could tunnel underground and pull conduit behind it, the only thing you would need to lay fibre would be some electricity and time.