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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

I know of only a few other people that have managed to get "real" fiber to the home.

I am jealous of them save for the "your monthly ISP bill is similar to a car payment" aspect.

I had "real fiber" run to our farm. 18 miles of cable was run and it took a year going back and forth. Originally it was a priced at $4500, which was to be a business expense. After install I had consistent issues with performance, after doing a lot of work to show them the issues and threatening disconnect, they upgraded the circuits for proper speeds and knocked it down to $2100. It's definitely still a car payment but it's much cheaper than it was.

Ultimately I get the SLA, Direct access to cloud providers maximizing performance, i'm also able to host a few IP blocks which allow a couple internet facing machines.

The home we sold recently had it pretty good too though, ended up with 3 5gig AT&T lines (no redundancy obviously) for only $450 a month total. That was pretty darn rad, even if the SLA wasn't the same.

Benefit of working from the farm is that I can also snag some bw for personal use ;D

So 300$ instead of $72.99 + tax and I get to not have Comcast? Sounds like a good deal.

In most cases if you have Comcast, your best option for a DIA is Comcast Business. Which again, is drastically better than Comcast's residential service... but it's still Comcast.

Comcast Business by itself is not DIA. You are still on the same CMTS as residential users. So you share the same resource pool. I have had Comcast Business for ~14 years and still fight with normal residential problems.

Such as over-subscription and having to contact the BBB to finally get a non-"Let me look at my book, ah yes! it's your modem" response. I finally was contacted by the Technical Operations Manager to affirm "Yes [name] is correct, bandwidth demand exceeds the capacity of the system in their area. We are working on a permanent solution to allocate more bandwidth"

That was 9 years ago, and I'm back again. I pay for the catchy "UP TO" 35 MBit/s upstream and can barely hold 2 MBit/s during peak and about ~25 outside peak.

I’m just on residential Comcast and the slow upload speeds are such a pain in the butt. I understand most of the users in this area use the Internet to consume from, but some of us want to serve stuff too!

My measured upload was 26.2Mbps. They offered me an upgraded upload speed package, I accepted it and am paying for it. It is still 26.2Mbps. I rebooted the CPE, waited months. Nothing changed.

Why not Starlink?

Starlink shared bandwidth amidst their network makes Comcast look generous.

Between fighting for bandwidth amidst everyone else going to the same base station, random assigned IP addresses that occasionally end up with accusations of pirating you had no partaking in, and storms messing with your signal quality, I would heavily advocate against any reliance on it for business related operations.

Starlink also does not offer static IP addresses.

> Starlink also does not offer static IP addresses.

They do, albeit I don't know the exact details as to pricing and everything. My company uses Starlink as a backup WAN connection at one of our sites, and it has a static IP.

From their official site:

> Although truly static IPs are not available, a reservation system retains the public IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix even when the system is off or rebooted.

You have a potentially stable address, but not a truly static one.

TCP can get confused by satellite handovers

https://blog.apnic.net/2024/05/17/a-transport-protocols-view...

Starlink is competitive with rural lines which tend to be DSL over unmaintained copper. If you have cable you will probably do better with that. If you are in a dense ish area just about anything will do better.

Not all Comcast Business, no. There are different tiers of product for sure. I have "normal" Comcast Business in my house, where I have basic Comcast coax service for a little more money with some better service guarantees and a little less nonsense. (The biggest upgrade is being able to email an account manager. The biggest downgrade is no bundling with TV because Business won't install it in a house, so if someone in your house wants Xfinity TV you get two unbundled bills.)

At work we deal with the sort of folks in this blog, where adding a link between a couple sites requires four or five months, multiple teams boring new fiber runs, etc.

It's more like $1000/mo I think. 300 would be a no brainer!

In London UK we can get dedicated 1Gbps for ~450GBP/mo with 3k install fees.

In my experience it's just a case of knowing who to call and what to ask for. We are served by Spectrum. They will drop fiber into any building in their HFC service areas. We had it into an apartment building for several years then moved to another building with only coax, but they quoted me $2000 install for fiber. Problem for me is that the fiber service is symmetric and so to get the kind of download needed for Netflix you have to pay for 200M+ upload. That's quite expensive for me so I passed. They don't offer 95% billing.

Sounds good but what are peoples use cases. Versus getting a regional EC2 and working from that?

Anything privacy related, running a TOR node etc. I get it.

In this case, he said it's a fun and interesting way to add resiliency to the existing co-location they have.

I frequently see people default to AWS, without any consideration of any other options. If you're running beyond a couple of small EC2 instances, it's worth looking at other options such as colocation. 37signals wrote about their cloud exit and how much they saved.

I have a few machines I use to mirror / duplicate data from my tenants and client tenants when working on larger projects. It makes it much much easier.

While Egress pricing is a pain in the ass on AWS, that's usually a small fee on the customer side comparatively.

Good luck when the fbi inevitably kicks in your door after running a tor node in the US on a datacenter connection in your name, with the physical hardware sitting in your home.

Non exit node was implied

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