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Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

arstechnica.com

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Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#5
post #2

> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served This doesn't seem very efficient to me.

Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#7
> Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.

Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.

You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas, sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems after storms.

And people want this all for $55/month!

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#8
post #2

> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served This doesn't seem very efficient to me.

Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.

Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well. I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#9
A couple of fun facts about this guy:

His little ISP is AS267, which is a SHOCKINGLY low number. That's like.. the ISP equiv of a 4 digit slashdot id, or owning something like sodapop.com.

He's also one of the authors of RFC 5575, which is a pretty big deal in the DDoS world.

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