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So there is a reason for this. The wires (the copper cabling) in your building are owned by hotwire or comcast or whomever made a deal with the building at the

So there is a reason for this. The wires (the copper cabling) in your building are owned by hotwire or comcast or whomever made a deal with the building at the time of construction. These wires are a real-estate asset with attached exclusive rights of way over them. For most buildings it is too costly to kick out comcast or build their own internal network. So technically her neighborhood might have multiple providers, each in different buildings. In some cases the building management is given a wholesale rate for your internet, and then marks it up and uses the revenue to fund association costs, or their own profits.

nine_k 12y ago
There's rather little problem to pull some Cat5 or even fiber through a reasonable-size building. Well, NYC buildings are tall, but that's what buys you more customers per yard of cable. If the building owners had an incentive, or just were not tied by a previous exclusive deal, the technical hurdles would be quite manageable, and more providers would be willing to run their cables and offer their services. When I lived in Moscow ~6 years ago, my quite moderate house on the outskirts of the city had 2 optical cables run into it, in addition to cheap DSL available over the phone cable, all in hope to serve 60 apartments of people with modest incomes.
- brianbreslin 12y ago
  I was previously involved in a startup tackling this idea. The pushback in the US market was that the building management is usually super non-technical, afraid of being stuck managing the network themselves, and afraid of the cost. For fiber to be run in a building with 250 units, you're talking around 100-150k in labor, materials, and other costs.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    I was just talking with some friends about a cloud-managed micro-ISP which would run essentially as a co-op within a condominium. Provide the back-haul and a remote monitored edge device to serve the building LAN, a billing and support portal, financing for the installation cost, etc. 250 units is about $100k in ARR. It sounds like it would easily cover the financing on installation costs with plenty of room to spare for operational cost and even some profit kicked back to the condo association. I checked your Bio and didn't see any mention, would you mind sharing the name of the startup that was trying this (or something remotely like this)?
    - grahamburger 12y ago
      Not sure about GP but I have a lot of experience in this area and have tossed around similar ideas myself. If you or anyone reading is interested in this kind of thing I'd love to chat more. Email in my bio.
  - jauer 12y ago
    Lately there are two ways I see MDUs providing internet outside of the normal cable/telco ROE arrangement (in my market) that work around that pushback: 1) Low-income housing with a up front grant from .gov for 512kbps or so per tenant. They hire a consultant to deploy wifi and hook it up to random ISP. ISP is paid out of the grant. 2) Mid-range or high-end housing pays a small local provider $10-25 per unit per month to provide X Mbps on a 2-3yr contract. Both cases remove the up-front cost. The former doesn't care about managing infrastructure and the latter has outsourced it to the ISP. For us, we try to avoid running new cable/fiber/cat5 because asbestos and cost, but we're working off different assumptions. Your model has cost per unit at $600 and we aim for less than half that otherwise ROI is too far out. Fiber costs basically the same as cat5 but you can frequently reuse copper for 100BaseT if there's a wiring closet per floor which greatly reduces the cost of running cable. Right now we don't worry about delivering more than 100M because most people we talk to care more about cost than speed once you reliably deliver 15-25Mbps (e.g. not over wifi, no cable/telco peering congestion BS/<10ms to google.com).
deleted 12y ago
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nine_k 12y ago

There's rather little problem to pull some Cat5 or even fiber through a reasonable-size building. Well, NYC buildings are tall, but that's what buys you more customers per yard of cable. If the building owners had an incentive, or just were not tied by a previous exclusive deal, the technical hurdles would be quite manageable, and more providers would be willing to run their cables and offer their services. When I lived in Moscow ~6 years ago, my quite moderate house on the outskirts of the city had 2 optical cables run into it, in addition to cheap DSL available over the phone cable, all in hope to serve 60 apartments of people with modest incomes.

brianbreslin 12y ago
I was previously involved in a startup tackling this idea. The pushback in the US market was that the building management is usually super non-technical, afraid of being stuck managing the network themselves, and afraid of the cost. For fiber to be run in a building with 250 units, you're talking around 100-150k in labor, materials, and other costs.
- zaroth 12y ago
  I was just talking with some friends about a cloud-managed micro-ISP which would run essentially as a co-op within a condominium. Provide the back-haul and a remote monitored edge device to serve the building LAN, a billing and support portal, financing for the installation cost, etc. 250 units is about $100k in ARR. It sounds like it would easily cover the financing on installation costs with plenty of room to spare for operational cost and even some profit kicked back to the condo association. I checked your Bio and didn't see any mention, would you mind sharing the name of the startup that was trying this (or something remotely like this)?
  - grahamburger 12y ago
    Not sure about GP but I have a lot of experience in this area and have tossed around similar ideas myself. If you or anyone reading is interested in this kind of thing I'd love to chat more. Email in my bio.
- jauer 12y ago
  Lately there are two ways I see MDUs providing internet outside of the normal cable/telco ROE arrangement (in my market) that work around that pushback: 1) Low-income housing with a up front grant from .gov for 512kbps or so per tenant. They hire a consultant to deploy wifi and hook it up to random ISP. ISP is paid out of the grant. 2) Mid-range or high-end housing pays a small local provider $10-25 per unit per month to provide X Mbps on a 2-3yr contract. Both cases remove the up-front cost. The former doesn't care about managing infrastructure and the latter has outsourced it to the ISP. For us, we try to avoid running new cable/fiber/cat5 because asbestos and cost, but we're working off different assumptions. Your model has cost per unit at $600 and we aim for less than half that otherwise ROI is too far out. Fiber costs basically the same as cat5 but you can frequently reuse copper for 100BaseT if there's a wiring closet per floor which greatly reduces the cost of running cable. Right now we don't worry about delivering more than 100M because most people we talk to care more about cost than speed once you reliably deliver 15-25Mbps (e.g. not over wifi, no cable/telco peering congestion BS/<10ms to google.com).

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]