Is he connecting to a backbone or to another ISP?
The "backbone" is made up of other ISPs
That's right, a backbone is made up of ISPs: individual spine pieces, or vertebrae.
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
181–190 of 439 posts
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#182> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that. I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
5G internet is no replacement for wired internet. The latency is terrible for use cases like gaming.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, at face value you're right about that, but I think the main difference is a lot of people don't get annoyed at , for example, Ford's customer service and turn around and start an auto manufacturer, and for most non-technical people I think they'd consider the two nearly equal in terms of feasibility and effort.
Not only that, but he’s providing a much higher level of service for a significantly smaller cost than ISPs that have been given billions over several decades and have yet to reach the customers he’s reaching. My biggest fear for him is that comcast will lobby to be able to sell subscriptions on his infrastructure (because competition!), put him out of business and then screw his existing subscribers. edit: s/provoki…
Exactly. It’s noteworthy because it underscores just how uncompetitive the ISPs in the US are. That a small shop can completely eviscerate them on quality and price shows that they just aren’t trying. (Look at ISPs in any developed country and our networks are embarrassing in comparison.)
It’s frustrating because the playbook for how to improve this is very clear; local loop unbundling on telephone lines, allow municipalities to offer broadband in underserved areas, and mandate sharing of poles etc. to make it easier for new entrants to compete. Of course when you can’t innovate, legislate; the ISPs lobby hard to prevent all of this consumer-centric stuff from happening.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lots of rural folks rely on well water.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources. It's like saying that if you build a gas station and buy your gas from Exxon then that's bad because Exxon also operates gas stations. It's not like an M…
> You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources.
The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen. It's not like the executives are oblivious to how much money each unit is making and whether another unit could make more in place of it. If you're the CEO and see you could charge twice as much by doing retail instead of wholesale then you'd obviously try to do that.
Rather, the explanations I'm getting from the other comments seems to be that (a) regulators require some kind of reasonable wholesale to exist to third parties, (b) the big ISPs aren't planning to serve those markets anyway, so they're not missing out on any income by taking money from the last-mile ISPs. And as long as those last-mile ISPs don't try to compete for the same customers then they're fine.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#187> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric company.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#188Crazy 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...
There are many reasons why this isn't done and isn't a good idea. One of them is: animals will eat the cable. Another is: people will trip over the cable. Another is: eventually someone will dig the cable up with an excavator, even if the operator of the excavator is the same person who carefully laid the cable a few years earlier. I don't explain how I know that...
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#189This 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.
It is government subsidized. He just wanted good internet in the area.
Is there any internet in the US that isn't subsidized?
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
That bill and these types of projects are basically why we have 10% inflation now.
How does spending a lot of government money make goods and service more expensive? EDIT: At least here in Western Europe, we mostly have a supply side inflation, because energy got a lot more expensive, not because the government has been "printing" a lot of money. I suspect it's the same in the US.
Actually Europe has been printing a lot of money by having less than 0% interest rate for loan.
Current inflation is due to many factor, some estimate it has been slowly growing since 2008, plus covid where we printed money to just to keep business alive, plus negative interest rate that allowed countries to loan too much, etc...
But I suspect that subsidies for infrastructure is one of the least impactful factor for inflation.