Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
A friend did this at his farm in central VA, but for power line instead of fiber. It was previously above ground, unsightly, and occasionally damaged by trees. He dug the trench from the road and had the power company lay the wire in it and make connections at each end. I don't remember the total numbers, but he saved thousands by doing the dig himself (with rented equipment) vs paying the power company to manage it.…
Yep, depending on the lay of the land doing the grunt work can save thousands or tens of thousands - if you have the company do it they'll almost certainly bring in a crew of 4 or 5 with a underground "hog" machine that's supposed to work perfectly but doesn't actually so the backhoe appears and then they cut into a buried utility line that was marked but backhoes can't read and then you wait for the power company to come out and then they fight over whose fault it was while the freezer slowly drips onto your floor.
Or you can rent a ditch witch and do it yourself and dig by hand near anything remotely marked by the marking crew.
I'm going to put my hand up and say I have absolutely no idea how an ISP works. He runs cables to each house in the area... now where does the other end go?
Depending on how close they are he could run cables (ethernet) or fiber. Single mode fiber can go 10km according to some Ubiquiti spec sheets I found on google. Ubiquiti also sells AirMax products that can do PTP or PTMP over the air, although some will be affected by rain. They could even rent space from a radio/cell tower. There are probably a decent amount of other products out there I am only familiar with Ubiqui…
You can shoot light over SM at distances up to 200km (several important caveats at this distance) and it’s very usual to see spans of between 50-80km.
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.
It's way easier to push fiber through the ground in rural areas where there's basically nothing than it is in major cities where there are tons of things and already some form of wired internet.
And if you're within a mile of the destination, that last mile isn't actually that terribly expensive, especially if it's literally rural and that mile is on the property owner's land. They can figure out how to get to the box at the road.
I can't find any section of that guide that talks about peering or whatever ISPs are supposed to do to connect to the broader internet. Do you see any step that explains this?
As a small ISP you don't peer - you just buy transit from a bigger ISP. So the basic steps are: 1. Buy a 1G/1G or 10G/10G whatever link to a building you own. 2. Resell that link in parts to customers. Or you can get yourself into a POP (point of presence) somewhere that multiple providers are also in, and get transit that way. Depends on where you are and what you can get access to.
Yes, it can be pretty simple.
Back in the day when DSL and comcast were the options and all of the connections were things like UP TO 5 or even 20 Mbps, but speeds were rarely that - I paid for a dedicated 2Mbs up and down ($180/month) with no restrictions on use and started sharing/reselling it to others in my apartment building, not with wireless, but with cat5 out the window, up the gutter, back inside, etc.
Across the parking lot another guy was sharing his comcast with another building - but comcast was starting to be so slow they couldn't use it. We merged our empires by stringing some cat 5 across the parking lot, around a pole and to his place. Later we added more nearby buildings, all wired until we had 5 buildings and about 20 "subscribers".
Even with 2Mbps, everyone on the network was happier with a guaranteed speed than their flaky "up to" speeds they used to have.
Did I run an ISP? I had subscribers, had to maintain a network, had a proxy server to reduce requests out of the network, had to deal with abuse and collect money - so I'd say yes, a small one, but yes.
This seems like a fun project to work on but what is the financial game here? Does he invest in building the network, operate at a loss and then sell to someone like Comcast? I assume building a remote fiber network that can reach 600 houses has to incur huge CapEx (way more than $2.6M right?) and at $50/mo a very long payback period. However it works, pretty awesome project, kudos.
The initial investment is paid by subscribers or financed by the government grant, both mentioned in the linked article.
The monthly income of $55 or $79 times 70 people is $3850-5530/month gross right now, which is likely not a full-time income, but with potentially 600 more customers soon, it's possible he could achieve a full-time income for himself, which many people would consider a worthy goal.
In 1994 or 1995, I used an ISP in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that was just one guy providing decent service. If there were issues, I'd call David and he'd fix them. His goal was to have good internet service--which was difficult to come by then and there--and to underwrite it by sharing it with others. I know he made a go of it for a number of years, although I'm not sure how it ended.
Gotta pay your fair share, so it can be granted out for someone elses gain
Today you help finance someone’s fiber, tomorrow they help finance your hospital/fire dept/etc, that’s the whole idea of public works.
Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
> 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 peo…
The correct price in cities is $10 a month. The correct price in rural areas is $500 a month plus. But we have to average them because we insist on taxing cities to subsidise rural lifestyles...
I don't understand this sentiment. Taxes are levied to then pay for things such as infrastructure which this qualifies as. How else should this work?
You are a private person and you choose to live deep in the country-side / on a desert / on an island / remote location / deep in the forest. Who should pay for your road, your electricity, your water, your internet connection when you are the one mostly benefiting from it ? Taxes have to be used primarily with the goal to maximize public interest, not the interests of single private persons. Perhaps a Starlink conne…
Do you also think the [16th amendment][1] should be repealed? Because what you are arguing is basically the same as the opponents of that amendment.