Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast expands to hundreds of homes (2022)

Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...

That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.

(not OP)

This nerdsniped me.

10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools.

However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP.

I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing

(also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)

You are doing God's work. Thank you. I wish more people cared about wasteful bandwidth usage.

Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr

If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D

It's not really the size that matters in this case, because the video is loaded after the page is completed, and in theory, ought not be slowing down the page if at all (my cursory examining of the network tab gives me a sort of confirmation).

However, what is indeed slow is the initial load, and the lack of CDN for their static assets (css etc). When the HN effect started eating their resources, these static assets are what hurt their load time the most.

Xfinity's website is like that, it barely loads even using their service. I've had it time out several times, and had to start over, just trying to help my mom pay her bill.

Page doesn’t even load for me.

Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.

No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.

> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.

If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?

If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).

Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.

Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.

Please don’t use C !

I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.

This has been my experience with our local ISP in Minneapolis as well. Granted, I’ve only ever reached out to them maybe 3 times over 6 years, but each time they’ve been exceptional. No more than two phone rings before a person in our metro area answered, they got me to right person who provided actual good believable information and the situation was fixed. The first time I ever reached out to them, by email, I wasn’t even a customer— I was calling to ask when they would resurface a sidewalk that they had torn up for an install in my neighborhood. The director of operations emailed me back, not with an exact date but with a pretty detailed reason for the delay that was clearly written just for this situation, not a form letter, and then he followed up when the work was scheduled.

> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.

Properly good, human and effective customer service is so rare these days that I tend to trust hyperbolic reviews like these more than others, believing that the person honestly feels that way, having been there myself.

I just wish they more reliably covered SF. Outside of the Richmond and Sunset districts coverage is spotty at best

Indeed. Guaranteed capacity for FTTH in the EU is often 0.1% or so of peak. Consistent with your answer.

I am not sure maximizing throughput to gigabit and beyond is materials efficient though. Fig 33 shows energy efficiency is squarely on the FTTH side anyway: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Prysmian-s...

A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.

Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.

> ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default

You're thinking with a technical mind, but don't forget the business, marketing, legal and support.

Why have "unlimited" speed as baseline while you can charge some 10 times more for the privilege?

Also don't forget that if you sell "10gbps internet" you might have to legally guarantee a percentage of that. Or you have to explain how networking works to everyone who complains they never see 10gbps on Speedtest.net.

Also the more you offer, the more expensive your modem has to be.

In the EU subsidies for infrastructure upgrades are tied to a minimum, non guaranteed, downlink speed of 30 Mbps. For a family it is enough for most normal uses.

ISPs perhaps decided it was commercially more convenient, for the industry at large, to cross subsidize demanding applications by providing everyone with gigabit class connections and CPEs.

Having switched from Comcast it is well worth it.

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 - Aug 2022 (427 comments)

Russia probably has state owned poles.

In most US places, utility companies own the poles and it’s ridiculously expensive to lease space. Urban areas with competitive ISPs usually have government owned poles or leases for streetlight arbs that allow them to string fiber.

Average salary nowadays is 800-1000$/mnt (after 30-40% taxes), I would expect internet price in US to be proportional to their labor costs

Why is labour so expensive in the US? Is it because of healthcare costs being passed to employers?

I assume you are on DOCSIS coax internet? The problem is upstream on DOCSIS is (very) constrained and if you hammer it causes huge problems for everyone on the segment (TCP ACKs start getting lost/slow, everyones ping rises massively and huge packetloss starts occurring).

Obviously no excuse to claim it is unlimited, but if the major US cable companies speeded up moving to true FTTH it would really save them a lot of trouble in the long run.

I’m in Vegas. It’s the first time I’ve actually had meaningful ISP competition and incredibly I can get fiber for 50 a month without caps. (Using quantum)

I was living in Indonesia, where most of people lives in individual houses, internet installation is free or ~20$, but monthly is 20-50$ for fiber 100mbps. In house areas they have noodles of cables on the poles but it works

Yes small city in central (European) part. Mobile unlimited 4g is about 8$ but some operators has FUP 200gb monthly, with 4g modem connected to the router and special antenna in the roof will work well outside cities. About remote areas I don’t know

Abit inconsistent you’ll need to use VPN. (Don’t we have to use it in liberal countries too if open torrents) It’s just some resources are blocked, it isn’t as bad as in China or Iran. Previously internet was same cheap but not so restricted

When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.

Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.

Indeed, our community had to fight that, IIRC, we had to vote to overturn those bans, but did eventually get it through. They also did a bunch of advertising saying "We have so many problems like traffic, shouldn't the money be spent there instead?", but the money that was used to build the network was NOT money the city could use for anything else, it was a bond specifically for FTTH initiative.

Buncha jerks.

I was in one of the earlier roll-outs and the change was amazing! It actually did happen during the pandemic, and at one point we had 4 people doing video calls from the house and Xfinity's fastest service couldn't keep up (because of outbound bandwidth limits), but the asymmetrical gigabit fiber wasn't breaking a sweat.

Now 3+ years later, CenturyLink (q.com) is finally starting to come through and lay down fiber. Those tools should have been laying it 20 years ago.

These are all statutes that impose obstacles to public bodies that want to roll out ISPs (few of the statutes are bans; more typical are rules like ad valorem taxation of ISP infrastructure). They're intended to offset cost advantages municipalities have in rolling out ISP infrastructure, because private ISPs have to pay taxes, buy rights of way, and actually win customers rather than rolling some of their costs off on the general levy. A colorable (though remote) concern would be that the most lucrative municipalities in a state might provision their own ISP service, thus cutting disincentivizing broadband providers from deploying anywhere in the state.

These rules don't keep people like the subject of this post from deploying community ISPs.

(I think the rules are very dumb but also the economics of small-scale municipal ISPs are not good at all; part of the reason they're dumb is that in reality a typical suburb has absolutely no hope of competing on price with Xfinity, Verizon, and AT&T.)

Community owned or government owned?

Longmont, CO has had municipal fiber since 2013. In 2005 the state passed a cable industry-sponsored bill requiring all municipalities to pass a ballot measure before they could build municipal broadband over 256kbps. Longmont had such a measure in 2009 and it failed due to campaigning by private ISPs. It passed later, and in the years since the speed cap has been removed. But yeah, it was a fight against private industry to use infrastructure _built and owned by the city_ for its only possible use.

https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/24/municipal-internet-sb-152...

I agree, though you can bet the Comcasts will just as sneakily and shadily legally maneuver to block private competitors too.