chrishacken

We're nearly 100% Juniper on the network side. The PtP and PtMP equipment we were using from Ubiquiti is now 95% Mimosa. The only Ubiquiti products that I like are Airfiber 24's and that's only because no one else offers an alternative.

We removed almost every piece of Ubiquiti equipment from our network because of the quantity and severity of bugs in their products. For example: Disabling a port on Edgerouters will grey out the port in the UI, but it doesn't actually stop traffic from passing through the port.

I also have no love for how some features are only available via command line while others are only available in the UI. This also differs depending on what product line you're using. Pick one strategy and stick to it.

You can't really compare the "F-Series" with a single car. A more accurate comparison would probably be all sedan's with the F-Series.

But yes, trucks are on the rise again.

Close to 200,000 Prius's are sold each year. While that's no where near the "best selling" car, their Camry (400,000 cars a year), that's substantial.

Unless I open up the device, there's nothing to attach ground wire to. The device is constructed primarily of plastic. Grounding the dish wouldn't do anything, would it?

Becoming a CLEC does classify you as a "utility" though, which has other benefits.

Their rates are surprisingly reasonable. For example, I mentioned that leasing conduit from the utility here is $3/ft/yr; those rates are as low as $0.6909/ft/yr, significantly cheaper.

Interesting; that clears things up. Thanks!

> No. And the reality is that IP connectivity is not much different to these other utilities.

I understand where you're coming from, but it is different. You have ample power to power your home; utilities can fulfill whatever your power requirements are.

The same can't be said about IP. I am literally incapable of live streaming from my parents house, no matter how much I'm willing to pay. There's no internet option, among the few available, that are capable of fulfilling my requirements.

They probably ran a 48-144 strand backbone so they'd be able to splice off a strand here and there. Another possibility is they reserved 5-10 strands for GPON; which basically allows you to use a single strand for up to 32 or 64 subscribers.

That would depend entirely on who's fiber is installed in your building and where you're located. If it's Fios or Comcast in a major metro market, you could probably get a residential or business line for as low as a few hundred. If it's a major transit provider like Zayo or Level 3 or if you're not in a major market; expect to pay a few thousand dollars.

> They do not do that. It's illegal under federal law.

They definitely do. Our city has a franchise agreement with the incumbent cable provider; they're the only company allowed to provide cable television service. ~10 years ago a company called NuNet tried to come in and run fiber in a neighboring city, Hazleton, and both they and the city were sued by the incumbent for breaching the franchise.

"perhaps" intended to mean, among the top*

But that's still debatable depending on what level of scale you're talking.

Deploying fiber throughout the entire United States, to every single household, would be near or exceed $1 Trillion. We have semiconductors in likely 99.99% of households now; at what cost? (I don't know, but I'd assume it's probably close.)

I have a /24 from Zayo and a /23 from ARIN for IPv4. For IPv6 I have a /32 IPv6 from ARIN.

That's in the works.

Thanks, fixed. I just got around to setting this up yesterday so the site itself isn't https yet and I just put // instead of the full path for the form POST.

That'd be great! Shoot me over an email: chris (at) nepafiber.com

Sorry in advance if I don't get back to you right away.

The majority of our customers are businesses paying >$100/m. Aside from that, I still work full-time as a Systems Engineer at USPS +$3,400/m after taxes.

I've had several meetings with a District Rep, who contacted his government rep at the utility for the area, who leaned into them. They said they would contact me; 3 times, and never did.

It's in their agreement, which is available publicly online. I managed to get 2 or 3 email responses, but they go dark for 2 months at a time.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wcd5z1itzu141ky/Screenshot%202017-...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sbkhujxkpepadjw/Screenshot%202017-...

That's exactly where it's from! Amazing place.

Of course; chris (at) nepafiber.com

The answer to some of those questions are complex. I was trying to keep the length of this post to a minimum, so I decided to keep that information out, but I'll try to provide some of the details you asked about.

The cost of equipment depends on the installation. If we use Ubiquiti sectors and CPE's, the sectors run about $500/each and each CPE is around $130. I don't think we have a sector with more than 6 clients on it and I don't think I'd be willing to put more than 10 on one, depending on the channel and signal, each antenna has around 250 Mbps of capacity. So if we have 6 clients on a sector, that's about $213/subscriber.

Most of our business customers are on PtP radios. I use Mimosa B5-lite's for those, which are $300/set.

Some of our customers are in properties in which we already have equipment, so the cost there depends on how many customers are in the same building. I'll typically run the CPE to a switch and then branch out to customers from there. Let's say that the property has 3 subscribers and I used a Mimosa B5-lite to the property. Add $300 for a switch and we're at around $200/subscriber.

I'd probably say that a client, on average, costs around $250 to get setup.

Every antenna and switch in our PoP is connected to a UPS system; I have one large 3U UPS and a few stand-alone desktop UPS's. They probably total around $2,500. We use a small fraction of our available bandwidth; that's not a concern. What is a concern is the spectrum available per antenna, which is why I said I would not put more than 10 clients on an antenna.

I'll write another post about the cost of fiber.

It's not that the bandwidth is expensive; it's the cost to deploy everything. If there was preexisting conduit/fiber in the ground and all we had to do was plug two cables together, I'd be able to charge $25/m too.

I've never been to the UK, but I believe your population density is a lot higher than that of the US; which is where all of our costs originate (interconnecting the customer to our network).

Renting duct is $3/ft/year. That's $15,840 per mile per year. That's not including ~$30,000 to contract out the work (I was quoted $7/ft) and $5,000 that the utility charges to have someone on-site to oversee the operation. I've determined we can microtrench ourselves for between $30,000 and $40,000.

I've been on contact with another ISP, https://tsi.io who has successfully done micro-trenching with very minimal capital. We're doing all of the work ourselves to reduce overhead.

That sounds like a great idea. I've actually debated doing this before, but I wasn't sure if the service disruption was worth it considering it happens maybe once every other month and sporadically at that.

Thank you. I obviously completely agree; we tried relentlessly to contact our local utilities to gain access to their underground conduit and was never able to get someone on the phone or even much of a response.

I eventually got to the point where I was like, "Fk it, I'll do it on my own." Now we're looking at microtrenching, which is probably an even larger endeavor, but at least we'll own the conduit.

> Bullet points on resumes that talk about non-specific day-to-day responsibilities are mostly filler.

This. A co-worker interviewed a guy last week who had 3 pages full of bullet points and when he asked him about his experience with any of them, he gave us some generic response like, "We used Java on project X that did Y". List 6-7 core skills; or better yet, list projects you worked on, the stack you built it on, and a very brief summary of how you kicked ass on it.

He has example projects on his site, which is great; most people don't even have that.

When I go into an interview as a developer, I always go in with a running example of a project that I built, with source code. Towards the end of the interview I'll bring it up: "I brought along a project I built; I'd love to go through it quick with you." At which point I go through the UI to show what it does and then open up the code to review the architecture and anything clever I did within the code itself.

Note that this all happens in about 5 minutes; no one wants to sit through a 30 minute demo.

Like I said in my other response; it comes down to money. If we took every "what-if" into account, we'd be wasting trillions of dollars each year on hypothetical scenarios.

This was the first time the spillway was EVER used in its existence; for all we knew at the time, it would have never been used.

It's easy to say this after the fact, but infrastructure like that has a minimal budget for that sort of stuff. If we did this on every dam in the US, it would potentially amount to a billion dollars or more. At a time when the government is trying to claw back budgets, that sort of thing is never going to be approved.