Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do this cheaply?
Namely:
-- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
-- customers who need 24 hour customer service
-- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
-- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
-- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
-- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Maybe none of this rises to the level of making it fundamentally different or unsustainable? But it seems to me the honeymoon phase doesn't last long, and it's got to hit some unavoidable realities soon. At least, if you think you can replicate this, it requires finding people and neighbors who are willing to do actual work and investment/concern to make something like this possible, and not simply pay a vendor a premium to phone it in. It must be treated like a neighbor-to-neighbor community project, not a faceless commercial transaction with its attendant obligations.
The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal have to be to defeat and replace Comcast rather than to supply internet service to his neighbors?
I think the idea that companies go under because they aren't ambitious enough says more about modern attitudes towards growth than it does about the reality of business.
A larger profitable company has more chance of survival by shrinking into a smaller profitable company. It's a buffer. But an already small profitable company doesn't have that option, there's more risk.
If your goal is to fight a monopoly, then the mere existence of competition means that you've accomplished your goal.
I would say that to attempt to have zero growth/shrinkage is difficult in business. The market is always changing, people's preferences change, etc. If you try to stagnate you will likely find yourself shrinking, either because demand changes, or there are mixups in supply (competitors).
If shrinking is the only non-goal, then growth is likely the only prevention since stagnation is hard to ensure.
Maybe the person that lives in that house in the next generation is the next great scientist that discovers how fusion can work reliably for us. If that is the case, then it was worth 30k to link that house to the Internet.
To hell with your paperwork. The wire is getting hung. You don't have to connect it, but if you want to, it's there.
So the power is on the provider here, there isn't really another choice for customers if the article is to be believed, no matter how good or bad the company is. Sure there might be disputes with vendors, but that's just part of any business.
The biggest threat IMO is probably some sort of competition. Maybe a big telco decides to wire up the area, although then they would be the second player in the market trying to steal customers who may not be interested in switching. Or if this really is a rural area, things like wireless last mile (basically LTE), Starlink, OneWeb, etc may start to be more compelling options if they get the capacity, latency, and price point to the right spot to be competitive.
Look at what this guy is doing. Many millions to get 600 customers paying <$100 a month.
A couple mill up front to get 500k+/yr means ROI of 5 years.
It's a sustainable model as long as you don't get greedy and I don't think this guys is doing this to be a 'gazillionare' :-)
> Jared Mauch gets $2.6 million from gov't to expand fiber ISP in rural Michigan
Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or not do business with whoever they want, provided they’re not refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or federal law.
> -- customers who need 24 hour customer service
Also easy. You are under no obligation to meet peoples unrealistic demands or needs.
> -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
He already is familiar with third party contracting.
> -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
Frivolous lawsuits are a risk in any business in America.
> -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
What is this "next technology requirement"? My area cable company still runs most their network on 30 year old lines.
> -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Cost of doing business, doesn't matter the size.
I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal broadband can be. It's why big players spend so much lobbying and bribing so they can keep their established position running and keep the gravy train running, but really the economics of it are fantastic once you've done the initial digging and running the lines, which sounds like he has here.
At $55 /mo for 400 households he's bringing in $22,000 a month plus whatever federal and local government subsidies and grants. The odds of a disaster, or one of the other scenarios you mentioned happening anytime soon is low, so he will have runway to build a decent sized war-chest to be able to easily afford handling any of these scenarios with third party contractors. The more houses he brings on line, the better it gets.
Anecdotally, I replaced a router they gave me because it would randomly crap out (probably neighbors using the xfinity Wi-Fi feature I couldn’t turn off), and they kept trying to charge me a monthly rental fee for their router. Every time I would call with confirmation it had been returned, the charge would be removed for just that month and back again the next - this is just the most recent example of a long line of infuriating time wasting schemes I have dealt with from them.
Compare that to a major telecom company. Even if I took the same approach, I would have more issues to deal with (typically issues over billing, rather than technical problems).
Then isn't this a point against the scalability / feasibility of this idea working broadly for others or becoming a model for replacing dumb telcos?
If part of the reason telcos are the way they are is because they have to serve everyone, and at some point if you run a service like this you will run into that requirement, then you will too become like a telco because of those obligations. And this is just one example of a factor that starts to matter.
I try to help out in my HOA of 25 people to manage the utilities, infrastructure, landscaping, and even with this small a group people are uncooperative and 1-2 people are constantly questioning and threatening to sue if we don't do what they say. Hundreds/thousands of people is even more a nightmare.
I do love the occasional power trip. I'd look them straight in the face: "here's our lawyers number, have your lawyer give my lawyer a call. Since you seem to be so adamant about suing, you should have no further contact with me. I'll see you to the door." and if they don't go? Arrest them for trespassing.
Sounds like a great power trip.
It's been over a year now and the project still isn't done. The fiber is right on the street, not even 30 feet from my unit. I'd have paid a couple grand to get my own conduit brought in, if that was an option.
The technical solution would be a QOS that deprioritizes/throttles these people first, with clear wording in the contract. The reality is that these people are a negligible fraction of the users.
Operating the network might be profitable. Recouping installation costs are not, when Comcast and other coaxial cable internet providers are sitting there ready to undercut you the second you enter the market. Unfortunately, sufficient customers are not willing to pay more for a reliable symmetric fiber connection yet over whatever the cable company is offering with meager upload.
Also, I assume you mean fiber when you wrote “municipal broadband”. I thought municipal broadband refers to taxpayer funded internet networks, where there would be no profit required (and hence is the only alternative to getting a better internet connection than the cable company).
It looks like his revenue is going to be $50k/mo in not so long and that's more than enough to have a couple of people willing to work on an as-needed hourly rate and to cover whatever issues come up.
For most of us, it doesn't cost anywhere near that much to get access so we can handle the rare costs to build out to remote areas where it's more expensive. That's the benefit of collective money. No one person has to shoulder the burden alone and together we each only chip in a small amount to achieve a massive goal.
America should be heavily investing in building out select remote areas now because we're going to be getting much more crowded in the decades ahead. Climate change is going to force people inland, away from the western US, and cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from around the planet to seek relocation. The US is going to have to do our part to help take many of them in. MI is a pretty good place to expand.
If you choose to live out in the middle of nowhere you’re going to have to pay for all kinds of expensive infrastructure or do without. Why do taxpayers have to cover this particular living expense?
Naturally, people realize that the farther out they get the worse their infrastructure will be. That doesn't mean the US can't or shouldn't set some minimum standards for what's acceptable. Most people think it's pretty reasonable for every American to have access to broadband. Its in everyone's best interest to make sure all Americans can get online. One nice benefit is that people will be able to spread out a little more and still work from home. That means fewer cars on the road, and fewer harmful emissions hurting the environment. Eliminating the need for commutes will be especially helpful in remote areas because their commutes are often longer than average.
I suspect that at a certain point the US will need to start policing where people are allowed to live more aggressively, but rather than trying to get people to move into dense cities to save a little money in the short term I hope it's used to try to limit the number of people living in a given area according to its biocapacity. Encouraging people to leave areas we expect will be hit hardest by frequent flooding, or fires, or droughts would be helpful too. We waste a lot money rebuilding over and over after predictable events. I can't blame the US government for treading lightly though. People aren't used to the idea of being told that they have to leave their homes and move, let alone being told exactly what parts of the country they have to move to. Probably best to start with people legally immigrating. I'm sure a lot of people would jump at the chance to move to the US even if they weren't assigned their preferred location within in.
Rural electrification and rural landline were also subsidized, so there is some knowledge of how to build rural infra via subsidies.
He'll also have zero churn. So that's got to help the bottomline.
Finally, I'm willing to bet it helps raise local home prices as those who had to have proper broadband were effectively excluded from that market. The point being, some homes will be able and will to pay more.
Certainly the future will be different, the comparison to traditional ISPs might not be reliable either.
That was my first ISP password assigned to me from San Jose based ix.netcom.com (Also the city I was grounded a month for running a $926 long distance bill calling into BBSs to play trade wars and the pit)
But the best ISP I ever had was a 56K dial-up in Seattle. To play Diablo.
I am looking to build an ISP.
Where I'm at Comcast is very reliable but I've had different experiences.
His little ISP is AS267, which is a SHOCKINGLY low number. That's like.. the ISP equiv of a 4 digit slashdot id, or owning something like sodapop.com.
He's also one of the authors of RFC 5575, which is a pretty big deal in the DDoS world.
20220607|arin|US|asn|888|1|assigned|66e25d155d3f3d57ff208733b59f8cc8
20220607|arin|US|asn|889|1|assigned|5b048aafff56a02f895e68ac5188853b
20220607|arin|US|asn|890|1|assigned|708d3f11915973323c76a5f95fa2d775
20220607|arin|US|asn|891|1|assigned|ab9bfca0becd32b7fe44c7ea0ba1aac3
20220607|arin|US|asn|892|1|assigned|0b9118a23862aab1647fd26939f7b219
20220607|arin|US|asn|893|1|assigned|57d59e6dfd1cd07523724f9cf5fc572b
20220607|arin|US|asn|894|1|assigned|0a932835b90a81bffeb1539b4bc93040
There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)
I'm being a bit lazy here but do you happen to know if there is a way to consume this programatically? I'm thinking RSS or perhaps an API?
Edit: For the benefit of others who might be interested, I've just subscribed using Feedbin's [0] email-to-RSS feature so updates will appear in my RSS reader!
That protocol is called BGP, or border gateway protocol. Most people's familiarity with that initialism, if any, comes from reports of major outages which occur when BGP routing --- effectively the list of peers to which a given AS connects --- gets fuxnored. This happens with somewhat distressing regularity (though not exceptionally high frequency), and along with some other notable failure points in modern telecoms (say, SIM spoofing, DDoS, or good old social engineering) is not-so-charmingly naive in its architecture of implied trust and lack of technical safeguards against either accident or malice.
As originally specified, ASNs ranged to 65,536 distinct systems (16 bits). That's since been bumped up to 32 bits, for 4,294,967,296 distinct systems.
Some old hands would track network abuse by ASN or a somewhat finer gradation, CIDR (classless internet domain routing), which tend to aggregate poorly-behaved networks into identifiable aggregates. That was somewhat more tenable with the smaller number of providers, though power laws and Zipf functions mean that bad behaviour does stil tend to self-organise in useful ways. Growth in indirection (VPNs and Tor) challenge this somewhat, with gateways now being identified as abuse sources, which is ... problematic.
The internet is decentralized. Basically, each autonomous system is its own network. This means that they need to connect with one another in order to allow traffic between each other. This is called peering. In order to peer with another network you must have an ASN.
The number doesn't matter.
So, not on that map, but it was part of ARPANET by the time the TCP/IP protocol was introduced in 1983[0], per this map: https://www.historyofinformation.com/image.php?id=6456
[0]: https://blog.google/inside-google/googlers/marking-birth-of-...
And packet inspection is a good fit for F's [FPGA's] by their very nature, DDoS's are squirrely and ASICs get stale, you need to reprogram you F's on the fly to catch that attack in-progress. So to adapt to new attacks on the fly, or update based on new fashions of DDoS's, patch vulnerabilities, and plus they're harder to reverse-engineer than ASICs, they're strong against that, good crypto to protect the bitstreams that define them. Basically built for that. ASICs on the other hand, can just have the lid scraped, take a photo, done. (Though to some extent they do put functionality on memory that gets lost if the chip is turned off during abduction, that can be done, the line between F's and ASICs is not truly that sharp).
A lot of DDoS's are done by state-sponsored or -affiliated or -harbored adversaries, capturing the ASIC that stops the DDoS is a real thing. Reverse engineering usually happens in another country, another jurisdiction. Under smiling eyes, blind eyes, can't get the police to go there, can't get extradition, maybe sue, maybe get them punished within the country that harbors them.[1]
[1] I read in China there was a Chinese man who traveled to New Zealand and murdered somebody, I think a woman. But he would not be extradited. Instead, the New Zealanders presented their evidence in Chinese court, which found it had merit and credibility enough to imprison the murder, within China, so he paid for his crimes fully. All without extraditing one of their own.
(An ASN is a BGP4 network number; think of it as an address in the backbone routing network.)
Here's this one:
That's over $11 per feet. That sounds about right. I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed at one of my houses (in the US), going down a very long driveway, with 3 patch panels, 2 at each end and one in the middle at a gate. That was just for my LAN, not internet access. I needed the link to hook up intercoms and security cameras. I absolutely wanted 100% reliability of the network link, so wireless solutions wouldn't have been adequate. The previous homeowner had buried a cat5e line in the first 500 feet, with a cat5e repeater (underground), but its electronics failed after a couple years and its exact location couldn't be found. And he had not even put the cable in conduit.
Are you saying you paid $18,000 for fiber optic installation at your house?
Also, do you have any problems with the connectivity or damages? If it is damaged, can you fix it yourself?
There is basically no reason whatsoever to stick with cat6 or cat7 at such lengths. Fiber beats copper in weight, speed, and reliability.
The whole project was worth it. This allowed me to install video intercoms at two gates, and many security cameras, which is what buyers want at such a property (it's a multi-million dollar estate, and I might want to sell it next year).
If the line were to be damaged somehow, I would need to call my contractors to splice and repair it. But I don't expect it to happen. In fact the line shouldn't need any maintenance over the next 20+ years. Heavy-duty conduit. Heavy-duty weather-proof enclosures for the patch panels. Etc. It's all the same stuff built by the same contractors who build fiber infra for ISPs.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
Also another great plug for ArsTechnica (even though the main article is them as well, and I'm sure most of this audience is well aware of them) and the excellent technical writing they do.
You still had to build-out the last mile though, and thats what will get you. You either need private easements, or be a registered telecom utility to use public utility easements. That last mile is $20k +/-, depending on your circumstances. If your semi-rural or less, there's ROI sucks. Hence, many smaller ISPs are wireless.
At least in area, there are already a number of wISPs, 5G is rolling out, Starlink eventually. and lots of gov't funding going to the big players to expand their networks (and drive the start-ups out of business.)
There some other business models out there too that look interesting. Underline in Co Springs, for example. They provide a basic tier of service, in order to qualify as a telecom, install the fiber and then allow multiple competing ISPs to use their network.
IMHO, any utility that has the benefit of government privilege should be required to allow competors to use the infrastructure that the taxpayers funded.
I'm waiting on one of you brilliant folks to defy the laws of physics to create a decentralized, wireless mesh internet.
These guys have dark fiber right in front of my neighborhood. They service cell sites for Dish Network near me as well. It's interesting to look through their services. For example, you can get fiber service with layer 2, where you're responsible for adding your IP stack over top of it. Or you can buy at layer 3, where Segra is already running a stack, and establish mesh connectivity. So if a fiber is cut, you'll get another working path. Build your network over the top.
Pretty interesting to understand what's available.
Basically everyone out there (including me) is on starlink now. Turns out the subsidies were not only inefficient, but pretty pointless.
1. Buy a 1G/1G or 10G/10G whatever link to a building you own.
2. Resell that link in parts to customers.
Or you can get yourself into a POP (point of presence) somewhere that multiple providers are also in, and get transit that way. Depends on where you are and what you can get access to.
https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/
If you just Google then it's usually called leased or dedicated internet
Just some (US) examples
https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-internet...
https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-intern...
https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-...
There's good chances there are Internet eXchange Points around where you live where for a small maintenance fee anyone can come and place their router and cables to interconnect with others.
So the likely steps are:
1) Find a transit provider, that will serve your trafic to any other network, and where to connect with this provider 2) (Optional) If you don't have the necessary infrastructure, find another provider to get from your last-mile network to your transit provider 3) (Optional) Find other networks to peer with so that you can significantly reduce your transit bill and provide better routes (therefore better service)
Some non-profit ISPs take the problem from the other side, and build a core network without necessarily owning any last-mile infrastructure, which is leased from other operators (opérateurs de collecte) with whom they interconnect at some datacenter/IXP. The most famous example of that in France is FDN.fr which has been operating since early 90s. That approach is more cost-effective in high-density area where the local infrastructure is already quite good, and construction jobs to lay new cables is very costly, but will still set you back 10-30€/month/line.
Most of the equipment you can buy, you can even get a lot of the needed things as a service. You just need to organize all those hardware and software things, and get the economic and legal part right too. And in the end it needs to tie together in a way, that your earnings are bigger then your expenses.
I think it’s not so different to opening a car repair shop for example. Just more nerdy.
How much would a 200km switch run?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Wow, sign me up. Comcast, which has a monopoly on my market, charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps.
In comparison, you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month. In some, you even get it for under $10/month (like Romania, which has surprisingly awesome internet infrastructure).
Monopolies and regulatory capture. I can't get ANY wired ISP where I'm at. Even AT&T ADSL which was like .5Mbps and ~50% packet loss terminated service to our neighborhood, saying the copper is too degraded. Comcast, for some reason, told us that to wire the entire neighborhood would cost them $73000 dollars, but they won't do it. That was 3 years ago. I'd have paid them 4000 dollars since then for business gigabit by now. I have been kicked off of multiple MVNO's (not for my abuse, but because AT&T/Verizon terminated their ability to sell SIMs for modem use).
My only current option is T-Mobile's home internet service (via LTE/5g), which works well most of the time but has some pretty ridiculous outages at least once a week. I gave Elon my 100 bucks years ago when they said we'd have starlink available by EOY 2021. They're now saying Q3 2023.
These ISP's have us over a barrel in the states.
You can look at the profit margins. 11.3% for Comcast as of June 2022. That tells me they aren't simply collecting the difference between US and Romanian internet prices in profit.
Of course, far be it from me to defend Comcast, but this is basically just the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP)
Businesses without competition get fat.
However, Charter Communications is a competitor that is more of a pure play and their margin is 10.8%
Of course, the older the buildings are the more expensive it gets. Running a new line into a single family home is usually a single new hole from the local utility trench or utility pole, which often have existing rights of way and known contact points to do utility work. Running new lines in an apartment complex often requires opening walls and ceilings between, among, and inside units, which then consequentially means doing new drywall and repainting (and maybe high costs to color match historic paints). If the apartments are condos there's even more complex rights of way issues in needing to get the consent of individual unit owners for some of the work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Nah, that's just their excuse; most of the country's population lives in urban areas and they don't even bother running fiber or setting up cell towers in more rural areas aside from maybe along the main highways.
Remember, SaskTel (and MTS, before the government sold it to Bell) doesn't have a problem with charging reasonable rates or building out fiber (and turning a profit at the same time) and those are the lowest-density parts of the country. So no, the telcos aren't telling the truth.
I suspect that decisionmakers in the US think that symmetric connections encourage communism.
And, in my experience, they will slowly ratchet up the cost until you call in and complain or change your plan, so a negotiated 80 dollars slowly can become 160+
Come to Minneapolis. 1 Gbps for $70.
Full respect to the man in the article for the hard work and initiative he took in starting a small independent ISP, but this story is the story of thousands of small ISPs in the US and many more around the world.
In a basic sense, this story is not "newsworthy" since there is nothing new about it. It's more of a human interest piece, like if the reporter wrote a story about the lady who started a coffee shop after being overcharged for a Frappuccino.
I'm guessing this ISP has gotten more attention here and on Ars Technica than others because the founder is fluent in the software engineering world, as well as having started an ISP. Ironically there is a pretty big gulf between the world of techies who know how to write the code on the internet and the people who actually build the internet who are more blue collar.
This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they are smart and their interview process is infallible.
So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual banter :).
The real heroes are the ones who make everyone else look better. But some managers only figure out who that is when they quit or when the business lays off the wrong guy because Steve produces less than Sarah, but that’s because Steve is helping people all the time, including Sarah.
There are obviously software devs who are more productive than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is thinking that (a) companies can somehow identify these people in advance, and (b) it is better to prioritize building a team with these supposed rock stars than it is to build a team of potentially average developers who know how to work together, and then properly manage, support & motivate them. A team of ten properly supported 1.5x programmers will beat out one 10x programmer every time. And in many cases the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type does not play well with others.
I'm a firm believer that any genuinely interested, motivated and at least mildly intelligent dev can be made highly productive by finding the right fit. It's far more important for companies to focus on fit and on ensuring that their own managers actually know how to manage than on trying to tap into a hidden stream of 10x devs.
I guess it boils down to the fact that I think many companies absolve themselves and their mgmt team of blame for poor performance by saying "well we just haven't been able to identify 10x devs yet." They expect to be able to hire a single employee who will save the day for them, rather than hiring and training good mgmt.
Second, I don't think a team of ten 1.5x programmers will beat out a 10x programmer. You either have the depth of understanding and imagination or you don't. Take Linus Torvalds, for instance -- I would say he is a 100x programmer, or perhaps a 10,000x programmer, since he is the author of both Git and Linux -- good luck trying to replicate that contribution with a "well managed team". It is similar in many areas -- 10 guys with Math PhDs do not make one Einstein.
In the context of hiring for a business that is developing a CRUD app, you're usually trying to differentiate between 1x programmers and 0.1x programmers, however -- 10x programmers aren't often looking for work.
The irony is most companies doing routine CRUD/simple business apps probably shouldn't hire such people as it's a waste and likely causes bad outcomes and perpetuates the stereotype.
Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally formulated it’s meant to be between your worst and best engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot, inattentive, sheltered, or all three.
Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in sick. They have negative outcomes all the time, which means everyone else in the team is infinity times as productive.
What the rest of us think is 10x versus an adequate developer, and there are almost none of those. Are there people who can work solo and produce as much as a team of 10? Sure, but that’s because of the communication overhead. Can that person join a team of ten and double their output? Only if they are a unicorn among unicorns. The easiest way to double the output of a team is to double the output of the team members. And that doesn’t make you look more productive than them. If you’re not very careful it makes you look less productive.
"Developer who is fortunate enough to be competent, in a structure with minimal comms overhead, high autonomy and no dead weight"
...and it tends to kickstart some good discussion on the topic as a whole.
Productivity = (Time * Effort)^Talent
People like Buckminster Fuller come to mind. Especially because of this quote of his:
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Never understood that mindset, when I see 100x engineering feats like TempleOS or αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblεs it inspires me to learn more and think outside the box.
is this really a valuable use of taxpayer money? sending a wireless link over a half-mile isn't that difficult, surely there's a better way to spend $60k of public money than delivering internet service to two families. especially now that starlink exists.
i'm all in favour of scrappy upstart ISPs, but this just seems wasteful.
the actual low income people living in rural areas have to move to a suburb or a trailer park if their region isn't serviced by a utility, they don't get assistance like this.
This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Of course, this assume you're comfortable with heavy machinery and can work around other utilities (most counties have a "Miss Utility" service that will mark existing services).
I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
So that means I paid for labor. But presumably some part of that $30K will be going to labor as well.
Another possibility is that when you get to the scale of 0.5 miles, you start using different tactics or machines than the small little backhoe loader that the guy used in our yard. So, more capital required but overall more efficient.
Anyway, I don't mean to try and offer an accurate accounting of all of this. I mostly just meant to provide a counter-expectation.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if it's literally rural and that mile is on the property owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at the road.
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
In other words, it is our money, and we can spend it on decent internet for rural areas.
Lack of internet access is disenfranchising when numerous necessary government and school services has been moved online.
I would not recommend doing this business with a spouse. They did not make it for many reasons, but running a 24/7 interest sped up all of their problems. Not unlike a vacation that is going poorly, but every month.
Also fuck Covad. They only had to suck less than Centurylink nėe Qwest and they couldn’t manage that.
Slides from Jared’s talk: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayO...
My biggest fear for him is that comcast will lobby to be able to sell subscriptions on his infrastructure (because competition!), put him out of business and then screw his existing subscribers.
edit: s/provoking/providing (autocorrect)
It’s frustrating because the playbook for how to improve this is very clear; local loop unbundling on telephone lines, allow municipalities to offer broadband in underserved areas, and mandate sharing of poles etc. to make it easier for new entrants to compete. Of course when you can’t innovate, legislate; the ISPs lobby hard to prevent all of this consumer-centric stuff from happening.
The world is full of small businesses doing good work in exchange for pay. theVC bubble isn't everything.
I did a lot of investigation some years back hoping to start an ISP in a much more dense city where options were still limited. I had quotes from electrical companies of $25k-75k to run 2,000ft of aerial fiber on telephone poles (no drilling even!) The electrical company (who owns the poles) said that only certified installers could do it but that list was rather short and the person I spoke with didn't seem to know what that certification actually was. I wonder if this guy simply figured out how to legally do the infra layout himself.
Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.
I didn't make the calculation myself, but a sub-10 year horizon for a project someone seems to do from the goodness of their heart, doesn't seem so bad.
Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!
Commercial ISPs have issues and they should not be given local monopolies but even shitty Comcast is better today than it was yesterday. The same is not true of most of the roads in my state.
But also, we're already talking about publicly funded infrastructure. We've subsidized broadband to every home multiple times by now, and we still continue to write those checks. Maybe if we want it to be private we should actually enforce that and then see how it goes.
Low hundreds of homes (so low probability that you know anyone there, and if you do they have already heard about it).
What were the returns - time will tell, but I probably have the best internet in London
What do we peer into - 10Gbps of NTT, two more 1 Gbps full peering sessions, plus the LONAP internet exchange to pick up Google, Netflix, etc. Plus my wife (AS210412) peers with me (AS211289) of course.
Also some bias shows here - surely the question should be ‘how did you meet your wife with multiple 3 ton excavators’.
The physical infrastructure of cable is not expensive. The fiber itself costs nothing in bulk. Currently a pair of 1Gbps 20km rated transceivers costs <USD$20 in bulk.
The only things that make installs expensive are: (1) regulation; in particular ingrained antiquated systems of land ownership and associated regulatory capture bullshit by established monopolies; (2) switching infrastructure and associated power, land and security requirements; and (3) one-time installation process costs such as trench digging, termination box installation and cable termination.
Once installed, the cables are unlikely to fail unless aggressively attacked with digging equipment.
> Mauch told us he provides free 250Mbps service to a church that was previously having trouble with its Comcast service.
That's interesting, he's taking money from the government and giving free internet to a religious organization? Do all "churches" get free internet or just the ones he prefers? Taxpayers are OK subsidizing a specific church based on one person's personal whim???
> about: ...I am a strong proponent of sarcasm.
So - difficult to interpret this comment.
An atheist might reasonably do the same for churches in his service area, for P.R. and Marketing reasons.
How is this different from Bob - who (say) the township pays to mow the lawn & plow the parking lot at the township hall - deciding that he'll mow the lawn & plow the parking lot for free at some local church?
He won a government contract to with specific deliverables. I'm not sure how he would have any responsibilities beyond those deliverables.
my comment is past the delete button so that's that.
However it works, pretty awesome project, kudos.
The monthly income of $55 or $79 times 70 people is $3850-5530/month gross right now, which is likely not a full-time income, but with potentially 600 more customers soon, it's possible he could achieve a full-time income for himself, which many people would consider a worthy goal.
In 1994 or 1995, I used an ISP in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that was just one guy providing decent service. If there were issues, I'd call David and he'd fix them. His goal was to have good internet service--which was difficult to come by then and there--and to underwrite it by sharing it with others. I know he made a go of it for a number of years, although I'm not sure how it ended.
> fiber network that can reach 600 houses
GP wasn't asking about 'original effort' .
Title mentions 'hundreds of homes'
I live in a town of ~15k people in a Southern state, and I have symmetric gigabit. Granted, I pay ~$110/mo, but I have the option of symmetric 300Mbps for ~$50/mo. Neither plan has a data cap.
Then again, I chose my home based on the local ISPs' physical network topology. I didn't rely on their service maps, either - I physically went to their installation folks and got a copy of their maps.
I pay around $35/mo for 100Mbps symmetric using a microwave satellite on my house's roof.
Monkeybrains is my favorite ISP, I currently use them. Affordable and reliable. A couple hiccups over the past few years (my internet speed was cut by 80-90% for a day or two) but resolved with a phone call. Nothing so bad as Comcast regularly becoming nigh-unusable at peak times.
It's possible that the county is trying to get tough with Comcast here - "stop gouging our residents so badly, or we'll help a local competitor (to you) grow into a real thorn in your bottom line". Starlink isn't credible for that.
And the money is from a "State and Local Fiscal Recovery" fund that the county has access to - so spending it on Starlink would probably be a legal non-starter regardless.
infrastructure outside of dense towns is unsustainable with the extremely low amount in taxes rural areas pay
these people do not deserve the same standard of living as those in sustainable areas
subsidize them to move to urban areas, not their lifestyle that uses 20x the infrastructure load an urbanite does
Amerika can't keep building out the same levels of roads utilities and municipal water to rural areas as it does to cities. this standard of living does not scale. it is not sustainable.
if you don't believe me, go look at 100 year infrastructure costs once a suburb needs replacing. this is why every town in America is failing
A lot of these people dont seem rich enough to justify caring about it being pretty...
Getting electrical and water in those situations is always a town by town crap shoot because the trades are constantly lobbying to disallow it because they want more work. I assume ISPs are the same way.
Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.
You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas, sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems after storms.
And people want this all for $55/month!
There are two homes that are a half mile away from the others. The $30k number relates to those two properties.
- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.
- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.
- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.
- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.