Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors | Hacker News Reader

Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors

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62 pointstroydavis20 comments

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“I had an old ASN laying around that I was able to use for this project.”

Ah, yes, like you do.

ASNs numbers are plentiful, and easy to get. IPv4 space, not so easy.

Please define “easy”.

Easy: You fill out a form. If you have a need and meet the technical requirements (multihoming), you get one.

Not easy: With IPv4, you'll be waiting for ages because they're out in most regions (ARIN.) You'll have to acquire one through a broker. This is time and money. Fortunately, I have an IPv4 allocation (/24, old "class C") from back in the 90's.

Hey, it's Jared! I used to work with him at Akamai -- great guy. Definitely the kind of guy who would do something like this.

I wonder if the utilization/customer is in part because of people's habits still being leftover from the WISP days. My ISP gives me ~950Mbit/s, and it's not unusual for my house to be using 70% of that with all the video streaming going on, especially in 2020. A couple of customers like me, your bandwidth rates are gonna start hurting really bad.

Also, it looks like he's running the fibers directly to the house in a point-to-point arrangement? Or are there passive splitters along the way somewhere?

You’re using a gigabit connection to capacity with less than a dozen people (assuming numbers, of course!) just streaming Netflix/HBO/Amazon Prime? I don’t mean to be sarky, genuinely curious!

If his numbers are to be believed, that's ~665mb/s, which is enough to service 20 4k streams... That number on it's own seems unbelieveable, however if there's an xbox or a playstation (or steam/epic launcher), many games have multi GB downloads every other week, and most of them will consume any available bandwidth.

What is the bottleneck here? If it is the uplink (not sure about the correct terminology, I mean the connection from the local box up to the Internet) maybe we can use local caching for stuff like the Netflix OpenConnect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_details_of_Netflix#O...

> Netflix settlement freely peers with Internet service providers (ISPs) directly and at common Internet exchange points. In June 2012, a custom content delivery network called Open Connect was announced.[28] For larger ISPs that have over 100,000 subscribers Netflix offers free Netflix Open Connect server appliances that cache Netflix content within the ISPs' data centers or networks to further reduce Internet transit costs.[29][30] The Open Connect appliances are purpose-built servers that focus on low power and high storage density, and run the FreeBSD operating system, nginx and the Bird Internet routing daemon.[31] By August 2016, Netflix closed its last physical data center, but continued to develop its Open Connect technology.[32]

> A 2016 study at the University of London detected 233 individual locations over six continents, with the largest amount of traffic in the USA, followed by Mexico.[33][34]

Maybe there are generic solutions for this (Maybe squid? I really don't know anything about these things) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software)

The numbers are to be believed, I can tweet usage graphs aside from what's in the slides. 5Mbps per subscriber on average. Some pull as much as 20Mbps and the big peaks are when my kids download games. Customers could get that speed if they hard wired too but they don't.

My reading of this thread is hlieberman thinks your usage will eventually go up when (if?) people's habits change.

> I wonder if the utilization/customer is in part because of people's habits still being leftover from the WISP days. My ISP gives me ~950Mbit/s, and it's not unusual for my house to be using 70% of that with all the video streaming going on, especially in 2020. A couple of customers like me, your bandwidth rates are gonna start hurting really bad.

The child comment is questioning hlieberman's usage of over 600 Mbps, not your charts. I guess you could throttle users with some kind of QoS? Personally, I don't think data caps would help here. Thoughts?

Is there a link to some text that I could read. Listening to the spoken word, I tend to nod off after five minutes. Don't think I can manage 42 minutes :]

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayO...

Here's the slides

Have seen this on HN before but can’t find the link...

Very cool video, but it seems like a ton of work. I guess if you’re committed to never move and want fiber bad enough :)

He’s probably got some good acreage. Can’t say I blame him.

I suspect (knowing the area like I do) and from some of the maps he showed, he's on ~2acres. Maybe a bit less/more. There's a ton of these small subdivisions springing up in the Ann Arbor area. Houses tend to be in the 750k-1.5m range and are usually plopped on an acre or so. Its country-ish living.

I'm not surprised at the slow Internet speeds and options though. Michigan has pretty bad rules for municipalities that want to offer Internet service and the density in these areas are too low to make financial sense for Comcast and phone companies to roll out any sort of advanced service.

What really surprises me is that his little subdivision didn't have cable service. Almost all of them I'm aware of have paid for Comcast to roll service into the neighborhood and swallowed the 50k or whatever cost. Then they just built that connection cost into the price of the property when they sold it on.

Yeah, he mentioned in the video that he tried to fundraise the $50k for comcast and the neighbors didn't go for it. But then he managed to get some support from the local township... I'm a bit surprised they couldn't get the Comcast blood money by going to the township.

Taxes! They build stuff!

Yeah people are super cheap. No one likes to pay for anything, especially if they think they can just wait you out. Once one person ponies up for the connection, everyone wins (because Comcast will wire the whole neighborhood). So they're just waiting for someone to cave. This guy came up with a different option and good for him.

I’d pay double for anything but one of the major telcos. Comcast will (hopefully permanently) be in my past in 2021. Can’t wait.

You too can start a telco and do this. Like I said it was just $1k to get on the list.

No. I self financed. There was another township that did go to the voters near me. One passed and another failed.

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