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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

One of my secret fantasies is an "Uber for ISPs". That is where someone ignores all the laws, rules, and regulations, and just builds a fiber ISP without anyone's permission. String fiber in through people's windows. Instead of burying them, put them in those temporary cable trenches (that you see all the time for construction or film crews), or run them beside sidewalks and cover them with cement. Hell, maybe a really sticky piece of duct tape is enough.

It would be totally illegal and you'd probably go to prison forever if you started a company to do it. And annoying people with scissors would be cutting them every day (not to mention glass-eating wasps! a real thing!).

But I'd pay for it.

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I did this on a small scale in college! Back then the only way to get internet was via dialup, unless you paid $300+ a month for a DSL line (which was about 5x the speed and always on).

Since my friends and I had all just moved into a brand new apartment building together, I picked up a spool of ethernet and some ends and we literally strung the wires from window to window (wireless was far too expensive). The building was blue so I used blue wires and the owner either didn't notice or didn't care, because no one said a thing about it.

We all split the cost of the initial supplies and then everyone paid me whatever they could for the internet and I covered the rest. We had 10 people and I ended up paying about $40/mo for it personally.

On the plus side, since I controlled the gateway (and old computer the University threw out) I could do fun stuff like traffic shaping and setting up a web server to be a bulletin board for us. Also I got everyone to install one of those enterprise notification things on their Windows machines so we could send blast messages to each other about going to the city or down to the local cafe for dinner.

Good times.

This is what I did in college! Ethernet cable under the carpet and along the wall for me. I had DSL piped into a Freesco Router (a floppy disk running Linux 2.0.36). I remember finally upgrading to an ethernet based ADSL modem that had the ability to flash it with router firmware. All I had to do was plug that thing into my 10baseT 3Com switch!!

We checked out a drill from the dorm office (could also get DVDs and stuff) and attempted to drill from inside of a closet into a beam that crossed the hallway. The beam seemed likely to be hollow so the idea was that then we could run a cable across and have glorious gigabit instead of the 100 Mbps that the dorm switches provided. But the exploratory drilling in the first closet was not rewarding.

I lived in the same apartment complex as some coworkers for a few years and we had a similar setup - one of our neighbors (a devops guy from work) had a high spec business comcast line and we quietly ran ethernet cables through the walls and ceilings so everyone had good internet for cheap. Great experience.

I've seen something not too far from this done in rural areas in the UK. It's not illegal - in fact, it receives public money via broadband vouchers!

Direct-burying of fibre in the countryside is cheap, doesn't require permission (beyond getting access to the land etc.) Landowners are generally hugely supportive, as they get better internet too (and being rural, have useless connectivity to begin with).

You can get street works permits fairly easily, for the "last half-mile", through access to "code powers" [1]. That also helps you bypass certain planning rules. And you can just do a regular premises installation - nothing cloak and dagger here!

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/inform...

In Nebraska we could direct-bury fiber up to eight feet underground with what was essentially a vibrating knife (pulled through the earth by two large Caterpillers) along the gravel paved county roads that were established when the railroads sold off land to finance their grade/track construction. It's incredibly cheap compared to any other means of installation and the right-of-ways are consistently available - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vibration+cable+plough&t=ffab&iar=....

A tiny fraction of our fiber was mounted above ground (eight miles out of over 700 IIRC) but it was taken down by tornados/wind shear twice in the first three years after it was lit.

Here in Iowa, I see these "Ditch Witch" things [1] everywhere they do utility work. Seems like they can do pretty quick work with them.

[1] https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills

Those will go through much tougher ground than a vibrating plough, but they're also much slower and you can see the trench when it's done. With the plough, we'd typically go through the gravel berm along the road and you'd have a hard time telling that it had just buried the cable even if you were looking for it!

See also “micro-trenching” https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9Cmicro-trenching%E2%...

Our fiber ISP, Ting, used those in our neighborhood to lay new lines. It was interesting to watch. For the most part, the only place where you could see any disturbance was when they had to pop up for a junction box.

Generally looking at around $200,000 for one of those. They work great in certain areas. If you’re doing urban work like we are they’re not so great because there’s a utility every 10 feet.

That's pretty similar to how broadband developed in Romania, and a significant reason why they have some of the best Internet speeds in the world.[0] It's also more or less the model that successful community mesh networks have followed, like NYC mesh[1] and Guifi[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYC_Mesh [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net

I don't remember the name of the operator but there was a small telecom in Houston TX that ran cable/fiber illegally all over the city. We worked hard to get permits for everything but it was tough seeing his infrastructure duct taped to the underside of I10 bridges. Very hard to compete with that!

> It would be totally illegal and you'd probably go to prison forever if you started a company to do it. ... > And annoying people with scissors would be cutting them every day

That is probably why the wireless packet mesh networks are more popular since there's no physical infra in other people's property (spectrum as "property" sounds odd, but even that is a commons for some fraction of it).

It only exists when it is used and just disappears when it isn't & is easily moved around.

I assume the illegality would be its own reward sometimes. Didn't El Chapo run his own cellphone network?

There's a whole plot line in "Person of Interest" about this happening in NYC, hiding in plain sight as regular TV antennas (the Panopticon episode).

The wireless mesh projects was the first thing that came to mind as well.

This is pretty common in India. All the Internet fiber is just spread from roof to roof, none of it is underground. It looks ugly but it is very convenient. Even the rates are pretty reasonable compared to some first world countries, I pay about $20 for 200mbps/1TB FUP, with some pretty reliable service.

Yes. I second the parent comment. I get 150mbps, 1TB FUP and my plan consts ~14USD per month. There is an offer also in which if I prepay 1 year's fee then I get 6 months free. This means the actual per month costs me even lesser.

Where can I read about glass-eating wasps? Google is failing me.

^^^^^^^^

I'm not sure if much has been written. I used to work on Google Fiber. One day a customer complained that their Internet wasn't working. A technician was dispatched. The technician found a wasp's nest where the fiber entered the customer's house and the wasps had chewed right through the fiber. I suppose it was surprising because glass is not a particularly soft substance -- with the right tools, sure, you can cut it, but it was surprising that wasps could cut it.

I think it's more like they chewed the rubber/support for the wire and then it snapped?

You would probably end up with something like this : https://miro.medium.com/max/2048/1*ZeyDyk8VYEY8-3Npb7Gw4w.jp...

They do have good service tho, not sure about the esthetics

This would be a great test for how reliable you can make a network if you add in a lot of redundancy. if you have enough routes it shouldn't matter if a few fibers get cut or destroyed.

The difference between Uber and ISP is that in addition to penalizing for illegal activity they will surely rip all the infrastructure built.

I would imagine that if you would run fiber to the nearest POP they probably wouldn't mind connecting you, since anything wrong with it would be on you.

Uber worked like that because governments are far less hesitant in fining / moving / removing stationary objects vs mobile objects which contains multiple voters inside of them.

i had a ~500 meter campus link in a rural area i maintained for 10 years, with fiber and coax when necessary. wire is right out, but fiber is such a bitch to work with. The tools are expensive and hard to use, to the point that we replaced our fiber lines with pre-made cables as the economical alternative to repairing breaks. This was a decade+ ago and I hope things are easier now.

You can buy a perfectly workable fusion splicer for (relatively) cheap from fs.com and similar sites these days. I wouldn’t go throwing one at a novice with no experience or supervision and saying “go for it” - but the hardest part of deploying fiber today is definitely permits.

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