fixthenet

Great tech questions. Right now, in our beta/test network, we're receiving DIA service to a remote server location and that's it. No peering, no CDNs. Our next steps are to increase the bandwidth of our DIA, since that's more cost effective at our current scale than we'd benefit by peering. The step after that is to swap that DIA for transport and then colocate in DTLA to find peers. CDN caches often require a minimum number of customers on network, something like 5000 for Netflix, if I recall, so we'll have to grow before we can take advantage of caching.

We're using fixed wireless. Advances in that technology have made high speed broadband feasible in areas with high wireless interference like LA. We believe wireless is the best path for what we're doing. It doesn't require interfacing with existing infrastructure anywhere but at the towers/APs, it deploys and redeploys quickly, and can provide competitive speeds and beyond.

More importantly, it gives us the freedom of building our own infrastructure, since access to public infrastructure is prohibitively expensive--by design, it seems.

I should add that it'll take us some time to tap into the federal programs and grants to truly make this incredible for low income neighborhoods. Venice has been serving us well as a means to get our sea legs, so to speak. Starting there won't impact our plans for closing the technology gap where it exists.

Our intended initial deployment was in Culver City, off a tower that had reach to Culver and city district 10. We met with LA city, Culver City, and did a lot of prep in that direction. Unfortunately, the critical path to fiber was delayed in construction for a year, with another year to go. In addition, we were thrown a curve ball with a tower engineering study prior to that tower's use that would eat up a sizable portion of funding.

Right around this time we were offered funding from WeTransfer as part of their Net Neutrality campaign, but under the obligation serve their area in Venice. We decided to go for it, and use that as a launching point for a proof of concept network. While not ideal for obvious reasons, it goes a long way towards proving our tech and business model. Our hope is that we can grow out the network towards Culver and CD10, acquire some critical infrastructure there, and then push east across the West Adams/Jefferson Park corridor.

It is a true deployment--we don't plan to uproot the Venice service, but it may end up being an arm of the network as opposed to the core in the future. One of the key goals of our project is to free low income neighborhoods from stone age technology by offering broadband speeds far above DSL for a fair price.

Like any business endeavor, if you don't have the skills to do it yourself, you need the resources to gain the skills, either through learning, networking and meeting people, or hiring someone. The scale you start at changes things too. We've spoken to a few grassroots ISPs that started 3-5 years ago by non-IT folks who just wanted to share with a few neighbors. Over the course of time they learned and grew the network and now they're at a couple hundred customers. Not big in the ISP sense, but it provided an essential service to their community and competes with [and steals customers from] incompetent, or at worse, anti-consumer incumbent ISPs.

If you have the passion, but not the IT skill set, be the banner waver. Be the leader of the endeavor. Use your passion to convert others. You'll find your talent.

No, but Necto looks like a very interesting way to make ISPs more approachable for a community. That's one of our own goals, but in our case we're doing everything in house, which makes the most sense given our expertise.

Josh from the Community Broadband Project here. Would be happy to answer any questions about our mission and progress in LA. I'm no regular, but we just got a bunch of traffic from Hacker News and I'm here to spread the gospel.

NYC Mesh is doing very cool stuff--we wish them the best. We're in touch with a few other community ISPs who are growing organically in competition against big incumbent ISPs. It's inspiring.

Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Culver City are all constructing municipal fiber right now. In the case of at least WeHo and Culver, it's aimed primarily at businesses. Some residents may see fiber offered by the incumbents, but we did some math of those offerings and it was $133/mo for 1Gbps. It'd be more helpful for the community if reasonable speeds were more affordable and available, than only some wealthy neighborhoods getting fiber.