...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.
10x engineers are a myth when it comes to productivity working within a team. There are absolutely 10x engineers when they're working on a project more or less completely solo.
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
141–150 of 439 posts
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#142Anyone else amused by the title? To me it reads as “Man […] expands to hundreds of homes.”
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#143Crazy idea, but why can't we just buy some armored cable and let it lie on the ground? People can bury it themselves if it really bothers them. A lot of these people dont seem rich enough to justify caring about it being pretty...
Traditionally the solution is to have a tiny outbuilding with your electric meter, water valve (if you're on town water) and landline connection and then let the homeowner deal with the bulk of the length of the line run.
Getting electrical and water in those situations is always a town by town crap shoot because the trades are constantly lobbying to disallow it because they want more work. I assume ISPs are the same way.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#144I'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?
As the other commenters have pointed out, a possibility is simply to "resell" transit from other providers. However, on the Internet all peering networks are somewhat equal and it's entirely possible to extend the "other end" over time to establish dedicated peering with other networks, so that for example traffic from your network to Youtube doesn't have to go through (paid-for) 3rd parties.
There's good chances there are Internet eXchange Points around where you live where for a small maintenance fee anyone can come and place their router and cables to interconnect with others.
So the likely steps are:
1) Find a transit provider, that will serve your trafic to any other network, and where to connect with this provider 2) (Optional) If you don't have the necessary infrastructure, find another provider to get from your last-mile network to your transit provider 3) (Optional) Find other networks to peer with so that you can significantly reduce your transit bill and provide better routes (therefore better service)
Some non-profit ISPs take the problem from the other side, and build a core network without necessarily owning any last-mile infrastructure, which is leased from other operators (opérateurs de collecte) with whom they interconnect at some datacenter/IXP. The most famous example of that in France is FDN.fr which has been operating since early 90s. That approach is more cost-effective in high-density area where the local infrastructure is already quite good, and construction jobs to lay new cables is very costly, but will still set you back 10-30€/month/line.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#145Isn't this just called starting a business? Don't get me wrong it's very cool but this just seems like the thing people should do when there isn't enough competition in the market
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#146> 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 - yo…
In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water mains.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#147A 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.
I recognized his name from providing hosting for the outages.org list[0] – if you haven't subscribed, and you do anything operations at all, go hit the button now. [0]: https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
Not come across this list before.
I'm being a bit lazy here but do you happen to know if there is a way to consume this programatically? I'm thinking RSS or perhaps an API?
Edit: For the benefit of others who might be interested, I've just subscribed using Feedbin's [0] email-to-RSS feature so updates will appear in my RSS reader!
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I find it's helpful to create a monopoly on purpose, and then give that monopoly for a service an additional monopoly on violence. Then, if someone doesn't want to use the monopoly, they can just send men with weapons of war to force them to fund the monopoly at gunpoint.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#149...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.
Most the criticisms of the "10x engineer" thing I've seen were more about this expectation that everyone can be 10x, when they're more the exception than the rule. Your average programmer is just that: average.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the 2nd step https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/ If you just Google then it's usually called leased or dedicated internet Just some (US) examples https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-internet... https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-intern... https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-...
So they're leasing ("buying"?) fiber from the same ISPs they're trying to displace and relying on that payment to provide them with continued internet access? This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP, but something akin to an MVNO where they're at the mercy of the same companies they're competing with. I get the initial sale might seem fine, and the established ISPs might be fine with this as long as the compan…
He's not trying to displace the majors. In rural areas, owning and maintaining a bunch of fiber to service less than a thousand customers isn't a business Comcast really wants to be in unless they get paid a ton for it.