9 ms·

Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

372 points by LorenDB 1y ago

ipython 1y ago
So glad to see a renewed emphasis on proper wired infrastructure. It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas, I assume because it's less capital intensive. Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to have their stuff together...
- LoganDark 1y ago
  > It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas Those are all telecom providers. It makes sense that they'd love wireless because they already have cellular infrastructure.
kube-system 1y ago
I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?
- ecshafer 1y ago
  This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset. These might have been the majority of cases.
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers. I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.
    - kube-system 1y ago
      Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32 million customers, that means you might get tens of thousands of calls about it. But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.
    - marcusb 1y ago
      I once spent half an hour on the phone with a dialup customer who couldn't get connected. Fortunately, they fixed their own problem - they had been entering the "letter zero" instead of the "number zero" (their words.) Took another call from an irate dialup customer who demanded a refund - he didn't know he needed a computer to use the internet -- and had driven himself mad dialing up our modem bank with his telephone and waiting for the training tones to subside so he could begin to navigate the internet as he imagined it to work: press 1 for email, 2 for news, 3 for weather... Despite the proliferation of smart phones and greater prevalence of home networks, I don't think the situation has changed much for a segment of the population once you get down to troubleshooting why something isn't working. The skills and the willingness to just try to fix the problem aren't there.
- mindslight 1y ago
  I'd imagine it's a lot less than "Okay, let's start by going into your dialer settings..." With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out. On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on. Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...
- boredtofears 1y ago
  Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at least, their support is capable of fully managing your router and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve direct customer needs such as a non-optional guest WiFi access point that any other comcast user can use). This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)
  - mindslight 1y ago
    > This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
    - bobmcnamara 1y ago
      Comcast killed my Internet during an interview video call. Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.
      - mindslight 1y ago
        Exactly. That's the kind of logic that only makes sense in a metastasized corpo. The only times my non-incumbent fiber connection has gone down in 8 years have been overnight maintenance windows that only happen maybe a few times per year.
        bobmcnamara 1y ago
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  My experience from almost a decade ago, mostly in DSL land, is that most customer calls were "my WiFi doesn't reach through the solid steel wall the router is hung against" and "how do I set up my email" and maybe "I lost the password to my WiFi again". WiFi issues were especially bad when 802.11n got finalised but there were tons of "draft n" WiFi devices out there that almost followed the WiFi spec. I still shudder when I see Atheros listed in device manager. There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters. I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves. Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    I quite enjoyed "I run a massive home business and require 24/7 uptime and will get extremely aggressive about this" "Maam, if your business is that important, surely you as a responsible business owner have gone and purchased a business class internet service with 24/7 SLA. It says here, you are on our cheapest, residential VDSL service"
- teeray 1y ago
  ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.
    - pintxo 1y ago
      Nice analogy!
    - MostlyStable 1y ago
      This, and also, it's much more common for internet problems to be caused by upstream issues not in the house (partly because of the situation you describe....not much to go wrong on the users end). It's very rare that a plumbing problem is because the main water line lost pressure. Back when I still had ISPs that provided the modem + router, every single issue I think I ever had fell into one of two categories: a modem and/or router power cycle fixed it, or it was a broader network issue that had nothing to do with me or my particular internet situation (this is omitting the most common third issue: terrible customer service problems, but that's a separate thing)
  - kube-system 1y ago
    Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever they have an existing business relationship with for issues related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it isn't illogical. Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
- bcrl 1y ago
  Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels. Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes. Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT. With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
  - supertrope 1y ago
    Right now device manufacturers are capturing the sliver of the market that actually cares about having fast Wi-Fi. A few ISPs have partnered with these manufacturers through the time honored business model of charging $10-20/mo forever on a box that costs $200.
- adambatkin 1y ago
  My electricity and water is much more reliable than my Internet service. Then again, I've never called my ISP about an issue that wasn't 100% on them, but the HN crowd is more exceptional in that sense than most people.
- protocolture 1y ago
  In my experience with small ISP's they make 99% of their own headaches, the last 1% being provided by the small consultants who work with small ISP. For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options. I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre. 70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related. They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade. Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.
RyanOD 1y ago
Congrats! I grew up just down the road from Saline. Exciting to see this happening on my old stomping grounds. Best of luck.
throw0101b 1y ago
A presentation from 2020 NLNOG by Jared Mauch who did something similar in Michigan community: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg 2020 NANOG: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo
Rooster61 1y ago
I once lived in a town with local high speed (although it was cable, not fiber). It really does make a world of difference in terms of what you pay and what kind of support you get. It's disgusting that big telecom has been able to monopolize so much of the US for so long.
yalok 1y ago
Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north. AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…
- Cerium 1y ago
  Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed, and customer service is much better.
  - mosdl 1y ago
    Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!
    - Cerium 1y ago
      Thanks for saying so - I got a flyer and didn't realize they are local.
    - mayli 1y ago
      I am on it, still a little bit pricer than Comcast, but worth every penny.
      - mosdl 1y ago
        In my condo complex the cost for Sail is the same as the lowest Comcast internet plan. Possibly Sail and others have forced Comcast to go down finally, which is great. Also the Sail support is really good, fast responses (even the CEO sometimes answers tickets).
- dilyevsky 1y ago
  Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.
teddyh 1y ago
I am always baffled by these things. Say there’s a huge company with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is “How did they get that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who must surely have had the idea to compete with them?” But no, these stories are always treating “Hey, let’s start a competing company!” like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of before, and that success is assured.
- Neywiny 1y ago
  I didn't think I've ever seen mention of a buyout in these articles. That could be something. Franchised ISP. Maybe Comcast is incapable of servicing an area effectively, so they could say something like "we'll give you x gbps of guaranteed throughout at the datacenter (or however it works) to our main line and teach you how to setup, you cover installation and maintenance". Just because it seems like it would've been easier for these guys to do only the installation and routine maintenance. But idk I guess they don't want to because they make their money anyway
- bell-cot 1y ago
  > What happened to all the other... There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month. But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic "... and the little guy wins!" spin. Ars is writing for an audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP's.
  - immibis 1y ago
    The capital for an ISP is surprisingly low. The main problem is getting a physical connection to your customer's house. And that's such an obvious legal minefield that no networking nerd wants to do it.
    - 1y ago
monster_truck 1y ago
If you ever have the chance to support a local ISP like this, do it! You can get some pretty sweet deals, the last time I had the opportunity to do this they threw in a /28 for "free" (agreed to two year terms)
- simoncion 1y ago
  When was the last time you had the opportunity to do this? 1998? I believe that what you're telling me is true, (and yeah, small ISPs are often really great to be customers of because of stuff like that) but -given the state of IPv4 allocations- I find it difficult to believe that it happened within the past ten, twenty years.
  - monster_truck 1y ago
    Less than a decade ago! The rough part is when they inevitably get bought by one of the big ISPs
nancyminusone 1y ago
I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. ~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
- gs17 1y ago
  > Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
  - nkellenicki 1y ago
    You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-customer-losses-comcast-says-all-its-new-plans-have-unlimited-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
    - PantaloonFlames 1y ago
      I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ? A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
      - amethyst 1y ago
WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
"Everything that we're doing is all underground." This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider. A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart. more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix. Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  Looks like they're somewhat rural which probably makes it way easier. I was a project manager for a Telco years ago and the process to get fiber run in an established city is crazy. Had no idea how much was going on under the roads until I had to plan out conduit boring projects.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit. Pro poles / open air: - very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania. - easy to get access when you need to do maintenance Con poles / open air: - it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it. - it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure Pro trench digging: - it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists. - it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards Cons trench digging: - it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare - you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench - when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault. - in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV... [1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shooting-along-power-lines-a-leading-cause-death-bald-eagles https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shoo... [2] https://ucs.net/node/513 https://ucs.net/node/513
xyst 1y ago
This is why national ISPs like Comcast have fought/lobbied tooth and nail to prevent municipal based ISPs from being created in various states (ie, Texas). Next logical step is starting a small ISP like these people have but they have the advantage of learning the skills and process (permitting with municipality) of doing this for other ISPs. There's also the capital aspect of this, which they apparently have. > Comcast seems to have noticed, Herman said. "They've been calling our clients nonstop to try to come back to their service, offer them discounted rates for a five-year contract and so on," he said. go figure. their monopoly/duopoly has ended, profits dropping like a rock in area, and now they want to compete. Only billionaires and people fooled by Peter Thiel think competition is evil.
bob1029 1y ago
I am in a rural area of Texas and I just recently got access to fiber. The other competition is ADSL and DOCSIS providers - AT&T and Optimum. Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water main break they caused last week. These FTTP providers have the game solved in Texas. I've seen them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live in the woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the electricity, and they're actively working on that in some areas now.
- Lu2025 1y ago
  > aggressive neglect for 811 Texas regulations are quite something. My friend told me that the closest thing to regulation and zoning they have is... an HOA. This was the first time in my life I heard anything positive about HOAs.
latchkey 1y ago
I wish these guys the best, but I've shifted more and more to Starlink. As long as their is a clear view of the sky, it works exceptionally well and is more than enough bandwidth. Plus, I can easily take it with me anywhere I go, which includes my campervan. This is great for when you're out in the middle of nowhere, with no reception, and you need access to maps. I wish it was a bit cheaper, but someone has to fund that trip to Mars.
- seany 1y ago
  I've really been looking at some of the new mobile options for when I take the family camping but I still need to get some stuff done. With that said, over the last 30 days at home we've downloaded 4.8tb and uploaded 6.2 (no torrenting). I'm sure there are thing we could do different, but two people that WFH and do some semi data involved things... really just not sure how we could make that work full time.
beeb 1y ago
Wow the US really has it bad when it comes to home internet. In many European countries, you can get symmetric Gbit internet for 30-40 EUR (probably less in some places), and I haven't seen a data cap in forever.
- gs17 1y ago
  It's getting better here. Google Fiber is expanding to a lot of cities and their symmetric Gbit with no data cap is the equivalent of 60 EUR ($70).
- HnUser12 1y ago
  Depends on where in the US. Most populated places have inexpensive internet. Smaller towns have these issues because there's not much competition.
- radley 1y ago
  Bay Area has sonic.net with unlimited 10Gb down & 1Gb up for only $40.
  - amethyst 1y ago
    *parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of course.
    - simoncion 1y ago
      If you haven't already, check to see if either Google Fiber or Monkeybrains is available in your area. Last I checked, the regs are still in place that prevent landlords from denying you access to an ISP of your choice.
      - slater 1y ago
        Seconding monkeybrains - they can usually get to houses that the other ISPs can't/won't service, and speed is pretty spiffy
sometimes_all 1y ago
I understand the need for independent fiber ISPs. But are gigabit speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps connection is way more than enough for a four-person family.
- BlimpSpike 1y ago
  The article says they're a 10 person family.
- freedomben 1y ago
  That's a bit more than I have (Starlink), but anytime a kid is downloading a big Steam game or big ISO file or something, everything else slows to a crawl. I also occassionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate. I've tried setting rules/priorities but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole
  - godelski 1y ago
    > I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate Just offering some advice if you aren't aware. If you are, freely ignore. (And if you have advice in return I'd love to hear!) For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0] rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to balance it depending if you want to be CPU bound or IO bound. You can pick the compression and level, with more options than just the `-z` flag. You can also increase speed by not doing the checksum, or by running without checksum and then running again later with. Or some intervaling like daily backups without and monthly you do checksums. If you tar your files up first I have a function that is essentially `tar cf - "${@:2}" | xz -9 --threads $NTHREADS --verbose > "${1}"` which uses the maximum `xz` compression level. I like to heavily compress things upstream because it also makes downloads faster and decompression is much easier than compression. I usually prefer being compute bound. Also, a systemd job is always nice and offers more flexibility than cron. It's what's helped me most with the wack-a-mole game. I like to do on calendar events (e.g. Daily, Weekly) and add a random delay. It's also nice that if the event was missed because the machine was off it'll run the job once the machine is back on (I usually make it wait at least 15 minutes after machine comes online). [0] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020
deleted 1y ago
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tptacek 1y ago
For anyone who doesn't know the area, Saline is adjacent to Ann Arbor, and along with Ypsilanti makes up a sort of greater Ann Arbor/UMich co-prosperity sphere. Saline is the kind of place you expect people to stand up a private fiber ISP; a place with an outer-ring suburb vibe, but far from any major metro, with lots of nerds.
guenthert 1y ago
Ha ha, I misread it as "Two guys hated using CompuServe, so they built their own ISP". Wrong millennia ...
immibis 1y ago
Getting the rights to lay the fiber seems like the most difficult part, and they don't go into much detail. Which HN user knows something about this?
spandrew 1y ago
I have to admit, everytime I hear the "Two guys hated x, so they built their own!" I see the XCKD cartoon https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys" end up.
coolgoose 1y ago
But kudos to them, that's the only way to break monopolies. Although I do wonder how much they bet on people not using all that bandwidth based on their promises.
- bradleyy 1y ago
  From everything I've ever read and my (admittedly old) ISP experience, people really don't use all the bandwidth. Yes, occasionally there are exceptions.
segmondy 1y ago
I hate Comcast, I need to do this too
mac-attack 1y ago
I'm a simple man. I see Comcast hate, I upvote
Lu2025 1y ago
> Any time any customers are experiencing an outage, maybe because of a lawnmower that cut their service line Whoa, they are laying cable just like that, in the open?
ElCapitanMarkla 1y ago
I'm kind of surprised how expensive this seems. I always thought NZ ended up paying through the nose for the internet but these prices all seem roughly in line with NZ except they're in USD which is about 1:0.6 right now.
dxxvi 1y ago
This "$80 for gigabit fiber, unlimited data" is a problem for me. I want to save money, I don't need a gigabit fiber but there's no other options. If there's $30 for 300Mbps unlimited data (I'm paying $40 for optimum) option, then I'll take it.

372 points by LorenDB 1y ago

So glad to see a renewed emphasis on proper wired infrastructure. It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas, I assume because it's less capital intensive. Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to have their stuff together...

LoganDark 1y ago
> It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas Those are all telecom providers. It makes sense that they'd love wireless because they already have cellular infrastructure.

kube-system 1y ago

I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?

ecshafer 1y ago
This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset. These might have been the majority of cases.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers. I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32 million customers, that means you might get tens of thousands of calls about it. But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.
  - marcusb 1y ago
    I once spent half an hour on the phone with a dialup customer who couldn't get connected. Fortunately, they fixed their own problem - they had been entering the "letter zero" instead of the "number zero" (their words.) Took another call from an irate dialup customer who demanded a refund - he didn't know he needed a computer to use the internet -- and had driven himself mad dialing up our modem bank with his telephone and waiting for the training tones to subside so he could begin to navigate the internet as he imagined it to work: press 1 for email, 2 for news, 3 for weather... Despite the proliferation of smart phones and greater prevalence of home networks, I don't think the situation has changed much for a segment of the population once you get down to troubleshooting why something isn't working. The skills and the willingness to just try to fix the problem aren't there.
mindslight 1y ago
I'd imagine it's a lot less than "Okay, let's start by going into your dialer settings..." With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out. On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on. Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...
boredtofears 1y ago
Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at least, their support is capable of fully managing your router and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve direct customer needs such as a non-optional guest WiFi access point that any other comcast user can use). This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)
- mindslight 1y ago
  > This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    Comcast killed my Internet during an interview video call. Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.
    - mindslight 1y ago
      Exactly. That's the kind of logic that only makes sense in a metastasized corpo. The only times my non-incumbent fiber connection has gone down in 8 years have been overnight maintenance windows that only happen maybe a few times per year.
      - bobmcnamara 1y ago
jeroenhd 1y ago
My experience from almost a decade ago, mostly in DSL land, is that most customer calls were "my WiFi doesn't reach through the solid steel wall the router is hung against" and "how do I set up my email" and maybe "I lost the password to my WiFi again". WiFi issues were especially bad when 802.11n got finalised but there were tons of "draft n" WiFi devices out there that almost followed the WiFi spec. I still shudder when I see Atheros listed in device manager. There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters. I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves. Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.
- protocolture 1y ago
  I quite enjoyed "I run a massive home business and require 24/7 uptime and will get extremely aggressive about this" "Maam, if your business is that important, surely you as a responsible business owner have gone and purchased a business class internet service with 24/7 SLA. It says here, you are on our cheapest, residential VDSL service"
teeray 1y ago
ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?
- dmonitor 1y ago
  Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.
  - pintxo 1y ago
    Nice analogy!
  - MostlyStable 1y ago
    This, and also, it's much more common for internet problems to be caused by upstream issues not in the house (partly because of the situation you describe....not much to go wrong on the users end). It's very rare that a plumbing problem is because the main water line lost pressure. Back when I still had ISPs that provided the modem + router, every single issue I think I ever had fell into one of two categories: a modem and/or router power cycle fixed it, or it was a broader network issue that had nothing to do with me or my particular internet situation (this is omitting the most common third issue: terrible customer service problems, but that's a separate thing)
- kube-system 1y ago
  Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever they have an existing business relationship with for issues related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it isn't illogical. Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
bcrl 1y ago
Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels. Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes. Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT. With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
- supertrope 1y ago
  Right now device manufacturers are capturing the sliver of the market that actually cares about having fast Wi-Fi. A few ISPs have partnered with these manufacturers through the time honored business model of charging $10-20/mo forever on a box that costs $200.
adambatkin 1y ago
My electricity and water is much more reliable than my Internet service. Then again, I've never called my ISP about an issue that wasn't 100% on them, but the HN crowd is more exceptional in that sense than most people.
protocolture 1y ago
In my experience with small ISP's they make 99% of their own headaches, the last 1% being provided by the small consultants who work with small ISP. For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options. I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre. 70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related. They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade. Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.

RyanOD 1y ago

Congrats! I grew up just down the road from Saline. Exciting to see this happening on my old stomping grounds. Best of luck.

throw0101b 1y ago

A presentation from 2020 NLNOG by Jared Mauch who did something similar in Michigan community: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg 2020 NANOG: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo

Rooster61 1y ago

I once lived in a town with local high speed (although it was cable, not fiber). It really does make a world of difference in terms of what you pay and what kind of support you get. It's disgusting that big telecom has been able to monopolize so much of the US for so long.

yalok 1y ago

Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north. AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…

Cerium 1y ago
Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed, and customer service is much better.
- mosdl 1y ago
  Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!
  - Cerium 1y ago
    Thanks for saying so - I got a flyer and didn't realize they are local.
  - mayli 1y ago
    I am on it, still a little bit pricer than Comcast, but worth every penny.
    - mosdl 1y ago
      In my condo complex the cost for Sail is the same as the lowest Comcast internet plan. Possibly Sail and others have forced Comcast to go down finally, which is great. Also the Sail support is really good, fast responses (even the CEO sometimes answers tickets).
dilyevsky 1y ago
Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.

teddyh 1y ago

I am always baffled by these things. Say there’s a huge company with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is “How did they get that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who must surely have had the idea to compete with them?” But no, these stories are always treating “Hey, let’s start a competing company!” like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of before, and that success is assured.

Neywiny 1y ago
I didn't think I've ever seen mention of a buyout in these articles. That could be something. Franchised ISP. Maybe Comcast is incapable of servicing an area effectively, so they could say something like "we'll give you x gbps of guaranteed throughout at the datacenter (or however it works) to our main line and teach you how to setup, you cover installation and maintenance". Just because it seems like it would've been easier for these guys to do only the installation and routine maintenance. But idk I guess they don't want to because they make their money anyway
bell-cot 1y ago
> What happened to all the other... There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month. But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic "... and the little guy wins!" spin. Ars is writing for an audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP's.
- immibis 1y ago
  The capital for an ISP is surprisingly low. The main problem is getting a physical connection to your customer's house. And that's such an obvious legal minefield that no networking nerd wants to do it.
  - 1y ago

monster_truck 1y ago

If you ever have the chance to support a local ISP like this, do it! You can get some pretty sweet deals, the last time I had the opportunity to do this they threw in a /28 for "free" (agreed to two year terms)

simoncion 1y ago
When was the last time you had the opportunity to do this? 1998? I believe that what you're telling me is true, (and yeah, small ISPs are often really great to be customers of because of stuff like that) but -given the state of IPv4 allocations- I find it difficult to believe that it happened within the past ten, twenty years.
- monster_truck 1y ago
  Less than a decade ago! The rough part is when they inevitably get bought by one of the big ISPs

nancyminusone 1y ago

I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. ~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.

gs17 1y ago
> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
- nkellenicki 1y ago
  You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-customer-losses-comcast-says-all-its-new-plans-have-unlimited-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
  - PantaloonFlames 1y ago
    I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ? A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
    - amethyst 1y ago

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

"Everything that we're doing is all underground." This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider. A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart. more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix. Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.

bongodongobob 1y ago
Looks like they're somewhat rural which probably makes it way easier. I was a project manager for a Telco years ago and the process to get fiber run in an established city is crazy. Had no idea how much was going on under the roads until I had to plan out conduit boring projects.
mschuster91 1y ago
It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit. Pro poles / open air: - very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania. - easy to get access when you need to do maintenance Con poles / open air: - it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it. - it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure Pro trench digging: - it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists. - it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards Cons trench digging: - it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare - you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench - when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault. - in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV... [1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shooting-along-power-lines-a-leading-cause-death-bald-eagles https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shoo... [2] https://ucs.net/node/513 https://ucs.net/node/513

xyst 1y ago

This is why national ISPs like Comcast have fought/lobbied tooth and nail to prevent municipal based ISPs from being created in various states (ie, Texas). Next logical step is starting a small ISP like these people have but they have the advantage of learning the skills and process (permitting with municipality) of doing this for other ISPs. There's also the capital aspect of this, which they apparently have. > Comcast seems to have noticed, Herman said. "They've been calling our clients nonstop to try to come back to their service, offer them discounted rates for a five-year contract and so on," he said. go figure. their monopoly/duopoly has ended, profits dropping like a rock in area, and now they want to compete. Only billionaires and people fooled by Peter Thiel think competition is evil.

bob1029 1y ago

I am in a rural area of Texas and I just recently got access to fiber. The other competition is ADSL and DOCSIS providers - AT&T and Optimum. Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water main break they caused last week. These FTTP providers have the game solved in Texas. I've seen them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live in the woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the electricity, and they're actively working on that in some areas now.

Lu2025 1y ago
> aggressive neglect for 811 Texas regulations are quite something. My friend told me that the closest thing to regulation and zoning they have is... an HOA. This was the first time in my life I heard anything positive about HOAs.

latchkey 1y ago

I wish these guys the best, but I've shifted more and more to Starlink. As long as their is a clear view of the sky, it works exceptionally well and is more than enough bandwidth. Plus, I can easily take it with me anywhere I go, which includes my campervan. This is great for when you're out in the middle of nowhere, with no reception, and you need access to maps. I wish it was a bit cheaper, but someone has to fund that trip to Mars.

seany 1y ago
I've really been looking at some of the new mobile options for when I take the family camping but I still need to get some stuff done. With that said, over the last 30 days at home we've downloaded 4.8tb and uploaded 6.2 (no torrenting). I'm sure there are thing we could do different, but two people that WFH and do some semi data involved things... really just not sure how we could make that work full time.

beeb 1y ago

Wow the US really has it bad when it comes to home internet. In many European countries, you can get symmetric Gbit internet for 30-40 EUR (probably less in some places), and I haven't seen a data cap in forever.

gs17 1y ago
It's getting better here. Google Fiber is expanding to a lot of cities and their symmetric Gbit with no data cap is the equivalent of 60 EUR ($70).
HnUser12 1y ago
Depends on where in the US. Most populated places have inexpensive internet. Smaller towns have these issues because there's not much competition.
radley 1y ago
Bay Area has sonic.net with unlimited 10Gb down & 1Gb up for only $40.
- amethyst 1y ago
  *parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of course.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    If you haven't already, check to see if either Google Fiber or Monkeybrains is available in your area. Last I checked, the regs are still in place that prevent landlords from denying you access to an ISP of your choice.
    - slater 1y ago
      Seconding monkeybrains - they can usually get to houses that the other ISPs can't/won't service, and speed is pretty spiffy

sometimes_all 1y ago

I understand the need for independent fiber ISPs. But are gigabit speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps connection is way more than enough for a four-person family.

BlimpSpike 1y ago
The article says they're a 10 person family.
freedomben 1y ago
That's a bit more than I have (Starlink), but anytime a kid is downloading a big Steam game or big ISO file or something, everything else slows to a crawl. I also occassionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate. I've tried setting rules/priorities but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole
- godelski 1y ago
  > I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate Just offering some advice if you aren't aware. If you are, freely ignore. (And if you have advice in return I'd love to hear!) For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0] rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to balance it depending if you want to be CPU bound or IO bound. You can pick the compression and level, with more options than just the `-z` flag. You can also increase speed by not doing the checksum, or by running without checksum and then running again later with. Or some intervaling like daily backups without and monthly you do checksums. If you tar your files up first I have a function that is essentially `tar cf - "${@:2}" | xz -9 --threads $NTHREADS --verbose > "${1}"` which uses the maximum `xz` compression level. I like to heavily compress things upstream because it also makes downloads faster and decompression is much easier than compression. I usually prefer being compute bound. Also, a systemd job is always nice and offers more flexibility than cron. It's what's helped me most with the wack-a-mole game. I like to do on calendar events (e.g. Daily, Weekly) and add a random delay. It's also nice that if the event was missed because the machine was off it'll run the job once the machine is back on (I usually make it wait at least 15 minutes after machine comes online). [0] https://rclone.org/ https://rclone.org/ [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020 https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020

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tptacek 1y ago

For anyone who doesn't know the area, Saline is adjacent to Ann Arbor, and along with Ypsilanti makes up a sort of greater Ann Arbor/UMich co-prosperity sphere. Saline is the kind of place you expect people to stand up a private fiber ISP; a place with an outer-ring suburb vibe, but far from any major metro, with lots of nerds.

guenthert 1y ago

Ha ha, I misread it as "Two guys hated using CompuServe, so they built their own ISP". Wrong millennia ...

immibis 1y ago

Getting the rights to lay the fiber seems like the most difficult part, and they don't go into much detail. Which HN user knows something about this?

spandrew 1y ago

I have to admit, everytime I hear the "Two guys hated x, so they built their own!" I see the XCKD cartoon https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys" end up.

coolgoose 1y ago

But kudos to them, that's the only way to break monopolies. Although I do wonder how much they bet on people not using all that bandwidth based on their promises.

bradleyy 1y ago
From everything I've ever read and my (admittedly old) ISP experience, people really don't use all the bandwidth. Yes, occasionally there are exceptions.

segmondy 1y ago

I hate Comcast, I need to do this too

mac-attack 1y ago

I'm a simple man. I see Comcast hate, I upvote

Lu2025 1y ago

> Any time any customers are experiencing an outage, maybe because of a lawnmower that cut their service line Whoa, they are laying cable just like that, in the open?

ElCapitanMarkla 1y ago

I'm kind of surprised how expensive this seems. I always thought NZ ended up paying through the nose for the internet but these prices all seem roughly in line with NZ except they're in USD which is about 1:0.6 right now.

dxxvi 1y ago

This "$80 for gigabit fiber, unlimited data" is a problem for me. I want to save money, I don't need a gigabit fiber but there's no other options. If there's $30 for 300Mbps unlimited data (I'm paying $40 for optimum) option, then I'll take it.