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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

A few years ago I learned that the only thing keeping me on 20/2 ADLS was a few 100 meters of already built but empty cable channel. I easily could buy that much fibre, borrow a fibre splicer and cable puller, patch it up to a relative in one of the already wired buildings and share their gigabit link with my entire apartment building. Half of my building was on the ISP that owned the empty channel, so moving to a competitor would've directly hurt their bottom line.

Except that opening the manholes is a crime, using the ISP's channels would be at least a civil cause of action, laying such infra requires a municipal permit... The ISP was not worried about such "competition".

Now try doing this in the US, the land of endless red tape, NIMBYs and HOAs. And without having an already dug cable channel. Sure, that's going to scare the probably multi-billion-$ incumbent ISP...

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This, more than anything, is the cause of limited space utilities monopolies. Companies have to license use of the backing infrastructure, and most often municipalities only give these easements to a tiny number of players. It's a textbook government granted monopoly.

To be fair, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building. That's more construction, more space use and more material costs. Ideally, we'd have one run going to every building, which the ISPs could share. Instead of 5x the fibre to every building, we'd get 5x the buildings with fibre.

To put it another way, the building of infrastructure should be a monopoly, but the use should be free (as in speech, not beer)

> I don't want five different fibre lines going to every apartment building

It’s funny that you’d mention this. My apartment fiber has four lines going into my unit, all under AT&T service, apparently for redundancy. I only use one.

https://imgur.com/a/Ss19AKk

People are too afraid of breaking the law. Look at every multi billion dollar company - all of them got where they are by breaking the law. How's it going to look in front of a jury when the government says "this man illegally brought cheap and fast internet to a neighbourhood?" The companies don't even have narratives that nice.

Even YC startups are encouraged to break the laws. The key is knowing which laws you can break, how much you can break them, and what's likely to happen if you're caught. When an illegal good thing is caught, the response is usually to slap on the wrist and legalise it.

A lot of current ISPs did start out illegally too.

Don't splice into other people's fibers though. That's a much worse crime of property damage.

You can break the law if you have money. That's it.

You won't be in front of a jury for "setting up fast internet". You'll get caught climbing into a manhole with electrician tools and charged with terrorism. The jury will be fed a story of how you had expensive specialized equipment on you, so this was a well-funded professional attempt at sabotaging critical infrastructure. You'll have a shitty public defender who will only realise that fiber in this case is about internet not clothing because he first read the file in the taxi to the courthouse. You'll take a plea deal because you can't afford a trial.

The system doesn't work how you think it does, at least not for the people on the ground.

You'll have money because you'll be selling fast internet to people. If YCombinator startups can make it work, so can you. Wear a hi-vis vest.

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