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Comment by pstadler | Hacker News Reader

I've been a customer of Init7 for several years. They're amazing. Some more boxes to tick:

  - Use your own hardware, no crappy ISP router required
  - They host a Netflix cache server, in contrast to ISPs actively limiting bandwidth
  - They launched https://mirror.init7.net/ after Switch announced they would stop running https://mirror.switch.ch/

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Also

* they actively promote network neutrality

* their fiber offering is just plain ethernet, so if you have a switch with an SFP slot, that's all you need (well aside of whatever you use as a router - but in my case, that's a VM running PFSense - you're totally free to chose whatever you want). Fewer moving parts means fewer issues.

* they hand out native IPv6 addresses and if you ask them, even a static prefix (for free)

* if you get a static prefix, they even delegate the ip6.arpa zone for reverse lookups

* total soft-factor: their support people use Dovecot Mail under Linux and their press releases are written in Libre Office

Disclaimer I have no relationship with them aside of being a very, very happy customer and I once brought them two bottles of whisky as a thanks for being really quick to set it up for me after I waited a long time for the electrician to put the fiber in my apartment.

I don't know what mirror switch is, but XS4ALL also has Netflix boxes. I didn't actually realize that it might be a special thing: why not reduce your transit traffic? But now that you mention it, yeah, murica.

And XS4ALL is also fine with you using your own hardware, but so are all German ISPs by law so that's not super special.

> [...]all German ISPs by law so that's not super special.

Wow, I didn't know that. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case in Switzerland where almost all ISPs force you to use their crap.

It's also not rocket science to clone their MAC and do the authentication afaik. But I've never had to do it so I'm not sure if it seems easier than it is.

In Germany before that law, they made sure you wouldn't get the credentials to roll your own. There were some tutorials around how to extract your PPPoE credentials from certain cheap DSL routers, but many were fixed over time, so if you really wanted to do it, you had to open the box and read the EEPROM by external means. Cable modems always have a certificate baked in and were tied to your account, so just cloning the MAC didn't help.

What about “Murica”? American ISPs have also had Netflix caches for years: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...

Some American ISPs have realised they can shake down Netflix for cash by refusing to install caches, connect at peering points and suchlike until Netflix pays them.

Some Americans can only get broadband internet access from a single company, so they don't have the option to move ISPs when their Netflix access is degraded.

XS4ALL is a Dutch ISP, not German

Upon re-reading I see how that sentence was badly written. I meant that there is at least one fairly large country (a neighboring country even) that mandates this, so I don't consider being allowed to use my own router very special.

> Use your own hardware, no crappy ISP router required

This has been true of every American ISP I've ever used.

I'm even currently running OpenWRT on my home router.

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