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

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

#111

...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.

A+ comment. I've been hearing this idea that "there is no such thing as a 10x engineer" for almost a decade now and from the very first moment I heard it I considered it one of the most definitively untrue ideas circulating in the tech industry. In fact, there are 100x engineers.

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

#112
post #42
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's fair, maybe this family should be able to opt out of taxes that don't benefit them then, you know since they are so remote and everything.

Sounds good. Might even bring some accountablity

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, inflation is currently a world-wide issue, and explanations at the world level lead somewhat obviously to the pandemic and Russia's invasion of the Ukraine. But here in the USA, people like to believe it must be political and local, completely unrelated to the totally-coincidental worldwide issue that happens to be very similar.

>But, here in the USA people like to believe it must be political... Cool, whats your prognoses for effectiveness of the Reduce Inflation Act

I'm in favor of the bill, but the name is stupid, even misleading. The spending is largely good, but it won't have much effect on inflation, if any.

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

#114
post #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 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...

Us vs them is not cool. Every lifestyle has value.

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

#115
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes

The resources of this country are to be allocated for the benefit of its citizens. In other words, it is our money, and we can spend it on decent internet for rural areas. Lack of internet access is disenfranchising when numerous necessary government and school services has been moved online.

>The resources of this country are to be allocated for the benefit of its citizens.

Sounds like a great idea! When can we get started?

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes.

Further, they should be forcibly blocked from using any services they refused to pay taxes for. No highways, flood protection, low food prices, or access to the global trade network for you!

Except if they purchase a subscription to these benefits through one of the two companies (same parent company) that provide them. The subscriptions are of course competitively priced, since they only have the best interest of their customers at heart.

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

#117
post #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 peo…

As someone who actually was working in excavation for internet... well, some points to unpack here:

- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.

- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.

- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.

- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.

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

#118

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.

Jared is not a rando who built an ISP. He is someone who forgot more about networking and running NSPs than most people know.

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

#119
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The corn has to be grown somewhere.

And it doesn't take very many people to do it.

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

#120
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand this comment. There are a lot of places in the country where a majority pays for the minority when it comes to infrastructure. Case in point NYC or Chicago, whose populations and tax bases make up a majority of the state, yet their taxes still go to maintaining the state infrastructure as a whole. The state, in order to function, needs some kind of continuity and predictability to plan for populati…

Even beyond helping the state as a whole, they are also helping themselves. Good luck getting anything into or out of Chicago or New York without rail, roads, locks, dams, and airports. Infrastructure that connects to nothing isn't all that useful. All that downstate Illinois roadway, railway, navigable rivers, and smaller airports have their uses for Chicago, too. That's what networks - like the Internet - do.
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