Hacker News Reader

  > competitively provide residential
  > Internet service to offset costs.

I uh. Providing residential Internet for an apartment complex feels like an entire business in and of itself and wildly out of scope for a small business? That's a whole extra competency and a major customer support commitment. Is there something I'm missing here?

It depends on the scale - it does not have to be a major undertaking. You are right, it is a whole extra competency and a major customer support commitment, but for a lot of the entrepreneurial folk on HN quite a rewarding and accessible learning experience.

The first time I did anything like this was in late 1984 in a small town in Iowa where GTE was the local telecommunication utility. Absolutely abysmal Internet service, nothing broadband from them at the time or from the MSO (Mediacom). I found out there was a statewide optical provider with cable going through the town. I incorporated an LLC, became a utility and built out less than 2 miles of single mode fiber to interconnect some of my original software business customers at first. Our internal moto was "how hard can it be?" (more as a rebuke to GTE). We found out. The whole 24x7 public utility thing was very difficult for just a couple of guys. But it grew from there. I left after about 20 years and today it is a thriving provider.

Technology has made the whole process so much easier today. I am amazed more people do not do it. You can get a small rack-mount sheet metal pedestal with an AC power meter and an HVAC unit for under $2k. Being a utility will allow you to place that on a concrete pad or vault in the utility corridor (often without any monthly fee from the city or county). You place a few bollards around it so no one drives into it. You want to get quotes from some tier 1 providers [0]. They will help you identify the best locations to engineer an optical meet and those are the locations you run by the city/county/state utilities board or commission.

For a network engineer wanting to implement a fault tolerant network, you can place multiple pedestals at different locations on your provider's/peer's network to create a route diversified protected network.

After all, when you are buying expensive cloud based services that literally is all your cloud provider is doing ... just on a completely more massive scale. The barrier to entry is not as high as you might think. You have technology offerings like OpenStack [1], where multiple competitive vendors will also help you engineer a solution. The government also provides (financial) support [2].

The best perk is the number of parking spaces the requisite orange utility traffic cone opens up for you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

[1] https://www.openstack.org/

[2] https://www.usda.gov/reconnect

This is some old school stuff right here. I have a hard time believing this sort of gumption and moxy are as prevalent today.

> The best perk is the number of parking spaces the requisite orange utility traffic cone opens up for you.

That's hilarious.

In 1984, I am guessing the only use case for broadband internet was running an NNTP server?

NNTP wasn't a thing until 1986

> You can get a small rack-mount sheet metal pedestal with an AC power meter and an HVAC unit for under $2k.

Things have changed a lot and the dominant carriers are no longer willing to interconnect with small guys.

The anti-small bias now extends to the Department of Transportation in most states (which "owns" the right of way). In Washington, WSDOT has an entire set of rules for "financially small" (their term) telecoms, basically designed to prevent them from existing. They claim this is to prevent "financially small" providers from defaulting on damage they cause to the roadway ("not able to abate or correct their environmental damage").

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wsdot%20%22financially...

You're missing "apartment complex" - you as the service provider contract with the apartment management company to basically cover your costs, and they handle the day-to-day along with running the apartment building.

Done right, it'll be cheaper for them (they can advertise "high speed internet included!" or whatever) and you won't have much to do assuming everything on your end just works.

The days where small ISPs provided things like email, web hosting, etc, are long gone; you're just providing a DHCP IP and potentially not even that if you roll out carrier-grade NAT.

I feel like this would open up the company to too much liability. Too many of your apartment users are torrenting/streaming/ too many DMCA filings to deal with when my main business is "hypothetically" being a top 3 nation wide payroll provider.

> it is quite easy and cheap to register as a public telecommunication utility

Is North Carolina one of those states? I'm intrigued…

I have only done a few midwestern states. Call them and ask [0] - (919) 733-7328. You may want to first call your proposed county commissioner's office or city hall (if you are not rural), and ask them who to talk with about a new local business providing Internet service. If you can show the Utilities Commission that you are working with someone at the local level I have found they will treat you more seriously. In certain rural counties, you can even qualify for funding from the Rural Utilities Service of the USDA.

[0] https://www.ncuc.net/

EDIT: typos + also most states distinguish between facilities-based ISP's (ie with physical plant in the regulated public right-of-way) and other ISPs. Tell them you are looking to become a facilities-based ISP.

What other benefits are there to being a "public telecommunication utility"?

The benefit that is obvious to the regulators is that you can charge money for services. So for example, offering telephone services requires being a LEC (local exchange carrier) or CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier). But even telephone services have become considerably unregulated through VoIP. It's just that at some point, the VoIP has to terminate/interface with a (C)LEC offering real dial tone and telephone numbering. You can put in your own Asterisk server [0] and provide VoIP service on your burgeoning optical utilities network, together with other bundled services including television, movies, gaming, metering etc.. All of these offerings can be resold from wholesale services, where all you need is an Internet feed.

Other benefits to being a "public telecommunication utility" include the competitive right to place your own facilities on telephone/power poles or underground in public right-of-way under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. You will need to enter into and pay for a pole attachment agreement. Of course local governments can reserve the right to tariff your facilities, which has its own ugliness.

One potentially valuable thing a utility can do is place empty conduit in public right of way that can be used/resold in the future at a (considerable) gain. For example, before highways, roadways, airports and other infrastructure is built, it is orders of magnitude cheaper just to plow conduit under bare ground before the improvements are placed.

[0] https://www.asterisk.org/

> Other benefits to being a "public telecommunication utility" include the competitive right to place your own facilities on telephone/power poles or underground in public right-of-way under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. You will need to enter into and pay for a pole attachment agreement. Of course local governments can reserve the right to tariff your facilities, which has its own ugliness.

Note that in many parts of the country, the telcos/cablecos themselves own the poles. Google had a ton of trouble with AT&T in my state thanks to this. They lost to AT&T in court and gave up.

Because AT&T never allowed Google their first attachment. Ma Bell is not stupid.

While VOIP is mostly unregulated, be acutely aware of e-911 laws and requirements. This isn't the Wild West shitshow it was in 2003 when I was doing similar things :)

https://www.intrado.com/life-safety/e911-regulations has a good overview and links to applicable CFR/rules.

> the competitive right to place your own facilities on telephone/power poles or underground in public right-of-way under the Telecommunications Act of 1996

This is not true. The FCC doesn't regulate the first pole attachment by a given attacher to poles owned by a given owner. The pole owners are basically free to use all sorts of lame reasons for refusing your first pole attachment request.

The FCC only gets involved when a company already has some (even just one) attachments and is getting rejected or stonewalled on making more attachments.

If you think about it, this is typical captured regulator behavior. The phone companies already have attachments to the electric utility's poles wherever they operate. So this lets the phone companies call in the FCC on any pole dispute. But it provides zero assistance to any new market entrants who want to compete with the existing phone company.

It also makes the decision to allow the first attachment a much harder decision for the pole owner, with the result being that the electrical utilities are incentivized to exclude new telecoms from competing with the phone company. But of course these new telecoms aren't trying to provide electrical services, so it doesn't look anticompetitive to a superficial analysis.

Thanks!

Feel free to reach out at my gmail [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stevenjgarner

> I have been using arrays of Intel NUCs at some customer sites for years

Stares at the 3 NUCs on my desk waiting to be clustered for a local sandbox.

I don't understand the pedestal approach. Do you put your server in the pedestal, so the pedestal is in effect your data center?

I suppose a NUC or two will easily fit in there.

This is pretty devious and I love it.

I like the cut of your jib.