6 ms·

Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender

by Nick-W 1y ago

Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network https://ayva.network

idiotsecant 1y ago
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
- snihalani 1y ago
  how can I do this for my city?
  - internetter 1y ago
    Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
    - Nick-W 1y ago
      This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
      - idiotsecant 1y ago
        Do you operate it as a nonprofit? Seems like you could be at least seeing some tax benefits probably
- m463 1y ago
  This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/ Useful threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
- Nick-W 1y ago
  I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    That's a beautiful thing.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
    - Nick-W 1y ago
      Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
      - soared 1y ago
        Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.
        Nick-W 1y ago
        We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
apercu 1y ago
I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.
- Nick-W 1y ago
  Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
  - NetOpWibby 1y ago
    > I get random cookies & care packages from people I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.
    - Nick-W 1y ago
      Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
      - 9337throwaway 1y ago
        Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain. I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful. I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.
robrenaud 1y ago
> In this sparsely populated rural area, "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." Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
- _heimdall 1y ago
  If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so? If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).
  - _carbyau_ 1y ago
    Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?
    - autoexec 1y ago
      Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there. That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen. 1: http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBrokenPromises.pdf http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBro... 2: A more recent example from 2024: https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-billion-internet-program-that-has-connected-0-people https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...
throwaway743 1y ago
Hell yeah dude.
lelandfe 1y ago
Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular. (Huge kudos for this project in general)
- mmh0000 1y ago
  Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D
  - fatboy93 1y ago
    I have metronet and it load in a seconds for me, tbf, I came across this thread post HNhug of death, so...
  - Nick-W 1y ago
    "Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189 https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189
- refulgentis 1y ago
  (not OP) This nerdsniped me. 10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools. However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP. I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing (also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)
  - lelandfe 1y ago
    Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those. I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Page never loaded for me on fiber. I see all your replies to people; have you considered that running a video on a website is just completely unnecessary? Video background and scroll to animate stuff was cool...in 2013. I think people appreciate a faster loading page with up front information these days. But you do you I guess! :)
navanchauhan 1y ago
Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex. p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you
- Nick-W 1y ago
  Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Please don’t use C !
ufocia 1y ago
Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
- greesil 1y ago
  At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost. It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.
- garbagewoman 1y ago
  What metric is “insanity” and why do you find that insane?
- Suppafly 1y ago
  >The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber. That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.
water-data-dude 1y ago
“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies” God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.
- Nick-W 1y ago
  I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.
iambateman 1y ago
This is really cool! Does long-range ubiquiti just work because you’re in the mountains? I’m down in much-flatter Columbia South Carolina. Would a similar setup even be physically feasible? We had a company burying fiber, but their installers almost blew up a gas line during 5 o’clock traffic and it really pissed city council off.
ksp-atlas 1y ago
This page is so large it causes the browser on my phone to crash the tab.
HaZeust 1y ago
Any plans to expand into JeffCo? Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
I am in France so not exactly in your coverage but I wanted to not that the comparison card (and the coverage one) do not work correctly. The first information is fine (say, speed) but when I switch to latency the graph does not change (and BTW it's not readable on mobile) Same for the coverage
BrandoElFollito 1y ago
This is what I love in HN. Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda. Great site.

by Nick-W 1y ago

idiotsecant 1y ago

How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky

snihalani 1y ago
how can I do this for my city?
- internetter 1y ago
  Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
  - Nick-W 1y ago
    This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
    - idiotsecant 1y ago
      Do you operate it as a nonprofit? Seems like you could be at least seeing some tax benefits probably
m463 1y ago
This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
toomuchtodo 1y ago
https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/ Useful threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
Nick-W 1y ago
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  That's a beautiful thing.
- sgarland 1y ago
  You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
  - Nick-W 1y ago
    Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
    - soared 1y ago
      Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.
      - Nick-W 1y ago
        We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.

apercu 1y ago

I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.

Nick-W 1y ago
Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
- NetOpWibby 1y ago
  > I get random cookies & care packages from people I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.
  - Nick-W 1y ago
    Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
    - 9337throwaway 1y ago
      Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain. I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful. I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.

robrenaud 1y ago

> In this sparsely populated rural area, "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." Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

_heimdall 1y ago
If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so? If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).
- _carbyau_ 1y ago
  Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?
  - autoexec 1y ago
    Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there. That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen. 1: http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBrokenPromises.pdf http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBro... 2: A more recent example from 2024: https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-billion-internet-program-that-has-connected-0-people https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...

throwaway743 1y ago

Hell yeah dude.

lelandfe 1y ago

Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular. (Huge kudos for this project in general)

mmh0000 1y ago
Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D
- fatboy93 1y ago
  I have metronet and it load in a seconds for me, tbf, I came across this thread post HNhug of death, so...
- Nick-W 1y ago
  "Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189 https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189
refulgentis 1y ago
(not OP) This nerdsniped me. 10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools. However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP. I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing (also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)
- lelandfe 1y ago
  Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those. I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.

fennecbutt 1y ago

Page never loaded for me on fiber. I see all your replies to people; have you considered that running a video on a website is just completely unnecessary? Video background and scroll to animate stuff was cool...in 2013. I think people appreciate a faster loading page with up front information these days. But you do you I guess! :)

navanchauhan 1y ago

Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex. p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you

Nick-W 1y ago
Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
BobbyTables2 1y ago
Please don’t use C !

ufocia 1y ago

Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.

greesil 1y ago
At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost. It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.
garbagewoman 1y ago
What metric is “insanity” and why do you find that insane?
Suppafly 1y ago
>The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber. That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.

water-data-dude 1y ago

“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies” God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.

Nick-W 1y ago
I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.

iambateman 1y ago

This is really cool! Does long-range ubiquiti just work because you’re in the mountains? I’m down in much-flatter Columbia South Carolina. Would a similar setup even be physically feasible? We had a company burying fiber, but their installers almost blew up a gas line during 5 o’clock traffic and it really pissed city council off.

ksp-atlas 1y ago

This page is so large it causes the browser on my phone to crash the tab.

HaZeust 1y ago

Any plans to expand into JeffCo? Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

I am in France so not exactly in your coverage but I wanted to not that the comparison card (and the coverage one) do not work correctly. The first information is fine (say, speed) but when I switch to latency the graph does not change (and BTW it's not readable on mobile) Same for the coverage

BrandoElFollito 1y ago

This is what I love in HN. Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda. Great site.