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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

> Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit.

Having your uplink faster than all your individual ports in a network helps prevent any one port from being able to saturate your network.

I work at an ISP that within the last year started selling 10Gbit symmetric, and we all sorta know there's not a huge use for it - yet. It's not really an issue for use to justify though, we don't charge any extra for it, it's all $40/mo and if you're in a new area we're building you get 10Gbit instead of the old 1Gbit at that price.

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Slightly off topic, but have you heard of Utopia? They’re a municipality in Utah. They run the fiber for a flat fee to customers and let any ISPs sell on it. Currently ~10-15 ISPs. Your guys pricing would absolutely stomp these ISPs. Have y’all considered jumping on these kinds of opportunities? No need to run cable and can just start accessing 100k+ Utah customers. Ripe for disruption.

I know nothing about your story, but based on what you said it sounds like it’s optimized already and the line-use fees+admin overhead pretty much explains why no one can offer better pricing. Again I know only what you wrote here, but that’s my uninformed opinion.

I’m not sure. The ISPs are charging $150+ for 10G plus you pay Utopia network $30/mo for the fiber line. So $180/mo total for the cheapest ISP.

Sure, but the ISP has to pay for transit, too. You aren’t going to be able to get settlement free peering as an ISP like that.

I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area and am probably missing some things. But, I figured if they’re already able to offer 10G for $40/mo when they have to run their own physical infra on top of the peering and data center costs then they should be able to do it at a higher margin without. That higher margin could be a boon for them towards building their own infra in their current service area as well.

If they kept the same price then the total cost to the end user would be ~$70 for 10G. Which is less than half of the cheapest option available.

Transit costs aren't always the same in all locations

That’s nice!! $40/mo? That does not sound like US price.

I can get 6 Mbps for $40 here. Good stuff.

Lol and I’m sorry. I’d almost rather go with starlink at that point.

There's a 10 Gbit cable going in on my street for $60/month in Florida. Some interesting things happening in internet infrastructure these days.

I would love for this to happen on my street in Florida...

I think it's way too rural at this point however, given that I am technically in unincorporated area.

What isp are you referencing?

What street? Are schools any good?

That's what I pay for 10Gb in the US. I think I'm a customer of the ISP the GP is referring to.

It is. Sonic in northern California. More places soon, but scaling out physical infrastructure build has its own learning curve and often larger lead times. :)

Dang! Good for you guys!! I’m in TX and ATT+Frontier have a firm grab on the infrastructure here. Charter is trying but still cannot compete with symmetric fiber.

I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that independent ISPs are having a bit of a resurgence, so maybe you'll be lucky and someone will look to serve your area. Or you can try it yourself. :)

I imagine it's easier now than it used to be to find some areas with good beauty and above ground infra (poles) that have space, and make a business plan and point at others that are doing it successfully as justification.

Or maybe we'll be there in a few years. At the rate we want to expand it's not impossible. :)

Just got hooked up in Oakland and loving it! Paying $70 less per month vs Comcast

Same. About six months ago I started see Sonic trucks all over the neighborhood, five or six at a time covering multiple blocks. I asked if they were installing Fiber and was told no. Not much later, a sales rep knocked on my door. I said yes to the service before he could even greet me. It's been great.

I was in Dogtown a year ago, but Sonic was just reselling AT&T to our address :(

Still very worthwhile to not have to talk to a Telco, but I had to rent + use AT&Ts garbage router because it did some proprietary negotiation step (With the ONT? There was a blog post where someone reverse engineered what was happening).

Now I'm in a smaller city and Sonic claims they have plans for us some day. For the time being, it's the Comcast nightmare.

Edit: and AT&T fiber was asymmetrical. Disappoint.

I'm in the same boat. I work there and can only get the resold AT&T service because my neighborhood was built pre-wired for only Comcast and AT&T, making it hard to service.

Still, like you noted, not having to deal with AT&T is a great selling point to a lot of people, and we're known for good support, so I'd like to think we're providing as good a service as those people can get until we build out our network in their area.

We have aggressive plans for the future, so I hope we're in your area sooner than later. :)

Please come to the Peninsula (with fiber, Millbrae). Tired of my only options being Comcast or VDSL at max 20mbps :/

I'm not sure the exact areas we're building and planning, but it's possible we're coming soon. As I understand it we hit most of the low hanging fruit in the bay area already (above ground infra, aka poles), so we're trying to use advancements in trenching and hitting some slightly less dense areas than we previously targeted to be able to serve new areas at the price point we've set.

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