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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

#191

Post by spmurrayzzz »

bombcar wrote: post #36
dataflow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You definitely can (and should) peer as a small ISP, even if you are buying transit from other providers. This is especially true if you're running an MPLS headend as you'll still have choke points at L2 circuits in your own network. Owning your own peering can be a great way to offload traffic to other circuits that share destinations, most commonly traffic destined for VOD/streaming CDNs.

(N.B. — This is what has worked well for the WISP I cofounded, but YMMV depending on headend infra).

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

#192

Post by andix »

samwhiteUK wrote: post #10

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?

I think you more or less just buy connections from bigger ISPs, so for example you get a 100 Gbps connection to one location and distribute it to your end users from there.

Most of the equipment you can buy, you can even get a lot of the needed things as a service. You just need to organize all those hardware and software things, and get the economic and legal part right too. And in the end it needs to tie together in a way, that your earnings are bigger then your expenses.

I think it’s not so different to opening a car repair shop for example. Just more nerdy.

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

#193

Post by toast0 »

ericd wrote: post #26
toast0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet. It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion…

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 $$$.

I've considered it, but I suspect it might end up like bombcar's experience with cutting buried lines. I'm not much of a digger for the manual work either. And there's a seasonal creek to cross which seems like a lot of fun.

I'm not too worried about the overhead portion; in theory, I could group with neighbors and we all pay a share, or I could pay it and consider it a goodwill gesture to my neighbors; they wouldn't need to pay that portion if they wanted to get online (and some of them have overhead drops for electric and what not, so they'd be able to get a cheap drop for fiber, too)

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

#194

Post by tstrimple »

tyen_ wrote: post #42
rvnx wrote: 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.

Rural sprawl significantly increases overall infrastructure costs. Their taxes are already being subsidized by more urban tax payers. Those rural areas can't afford to maintain what they have.

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

#195

Post by dboreham »

cestith wrote: post #146
mschuster91 wrote: post #117

Earlier 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.

I live in one of those rural homes. We only get electricity (and natural gas too, but that's unusual around here) brought in. Water and sewer are on-site. Phone is VoIP. Internet is wireless (via an ISP I built). Rural piped water is very rare here.

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

#196

Post by teaearlgraycold »

vaidhy wrote: post #161
andrewallbright wrote: post #84

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

There are extremely competent programmers (10x) like there are outstanding players in sports and music. They do have an outsized impact on the projects they work on. However, they are also extremely rare. The problem, IMHO, comes from cult-startups where they think they can (a) identify these people in an interview (b) build a team of only 10x programmers. This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmer…

Then good luck hiring a well sized team when you’ve set the expectation that everyone needs to be a genius to contribute. A successful startup needs to either attract only the best engineers or build itself so that most of the work can be done by merely good engineers following the company’s engineering culture.

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

#197

Post by banannaise »

thrashh wrote: post #154
banannaise wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are 10x engineers on teams. They just empower everyone

Yeah, but that's also different from how people, especially management, tend to conceptualize 10x engineers. You don't spot the 10x engineer by looking for the one who accomplishes 10x what other engineers do. You spot them by looking for the team that's accomplishing 5x what other teams are, and then finding the "glue" person on that team.

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

#198

Post by mensetmanusman »

rvnx wrote: post #20
deelowe wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

Some people are farmers. Everyone benefits if there is Internet in remote places in order to help people stay and live where the farming is going to happen.

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

#200

Post by RockRobotRock »

haunter wrote: post #135
MerelyMortal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this could be made into an ISP Tycoon game.

It actually does exist lol! Made by Cisco as an e-learning tool Gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foa34qoRzjs https://web.archive.org/web/20150317144142/https://cisco.edu...

Oh god, it seems to essentially be packet tracer under the hood. It's a great tool, but I HATED using it in school.
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