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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

#231

Post by judge2020 »

boplicity wrote: post #226

He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue. Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

This is how the ISPs work as well, typically 10 years is common ROI for any neighborhood and 5-10 years for multi-family housing (apartment) runs. This is also the reason AT&T/Comcast won't run new installations to small (less than 40 residents in my experience) or rural neighborhoods since the ROI time gets longer the fewer potential customers they have.

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

#232

Post by Octoth0rpe »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #217
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RFC 5575 is a widely adopted specification implemented by router vendors that lets ISPs (think Comcast, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Akamai) block certain kinds of traffic at their routers using rules called "Flow Specifications". A rule looks _something_ like "Drop traffic if it's on Port 80 and its packet size is 252 bits". That level of logic is good enough to block many simple DDoS attacks, and since it's done on a…

Yeah FPGA's are marketed for packet inspection. Like on xilinx.com, and microsemi.com, they talk about radar and military, defense, on top of AI and fintech. It's just really hard to market FPGA's, it's such a shiny toy but then it never ends up actually selling in volume, like GPUs, there's envy of that success. Especially because in many ways F's have merits that go toe-to-toe with GPU, and defeat them in eg latenc…

Amidst all the discussion of fpga vs asic vs flowspec, it's probably worth distinguishing two types of attacks: big, dumb volumetric ddos (flow specifications are great and cheap here, if you can match), and more sophisticated layer 5/6/7 attacks where FPGA/packet inspectors are likely necessary (unless you get lucky and the supposedly smart attack has an obvious signature such as a particular packet length combined with other components)

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

#233

Post by pphysch »

boplicity wrote: post #226

He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue. Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

Has a road or water line ever paid for itself?

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

#234

Post by missedthecue »

capableweb wrote: post #207
H1Supreme wrote: post #203

> 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month Wow, sign me up. Comcast, which has a monopoly on my market, charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps.

The costs for internet in the US still surprises me, how on earth can it be so expensive?! I understand some countries, but in the US, it seems high costs are because "because we can", not because it has to be like that. In comparison, you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month. In some, you even get it for under $10/month (like Romania, which has surprisingly awesome i…

Comcast has 189,000 employees who make US salaries. It costs a lot less to dig a trench in Romania than in Seattle.

You can look at the profit margins. 11.3% for Comcast as of June 2022. That tells me they aren't simply collecting the difference between US and Romanian internet prices in profit.

Of course, far be it from me to defend Comcast, but this is basically just the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP)

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

#235

Post by bell-cot »

hcurtiss wrote: post #211
bell-cot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah! - so the next neighborhood over has all-private roads, and the homeowners association there ( not the government) pays for all snow plowing, crack & pothole patching, repaving, storm sewer work, etc. that might be needed?

I get the point you're making, but to the facts, that is quite literally how many subdivisions work, and least in the western US.

In my corner of Michigan, there seems to be a very clear dichotomy on this:

- Private developer builds a sprawling subdivision with plenty of nice wide roads and lots. (So a very large area of pavement per tax-paying property.) And turns the whole thing over to the city/village/township, to be their public road budget black hole forever more.

- Private developer builds a very compact little development, with houses (or condo's) packed in like sardines along a rather narrow and minimalist Private Road.

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

#236

Post by cool_dude85 »

boplicity wrote: post #226

He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue. Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

Not that bad. A lot of utility-type businesses expect to have much longer return on investment times, the electric business is usually wanting to get 50 years of life out of a new baseload generating unit, and it might be 30 or 40 to get your investment back.

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

#237

Post by jrajav »

boplicity wrote: post #226

He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue. Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

So taxpayer dollars are necessary to make this business viable, and the product of that business is something that, realistically, everyone absolutely needs access to - certainly seems like this should not be a private business at all but a public utility. Have we ever asked this kind of question for interstate highways?

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

#238

Post by capableweb »

boplicity wrote: post #226

He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue. Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.

The actual price they are offering seems to be $55 or $79/month + ~$200 installation fee. Also missing in your calculation, is a $30/month subsidy from FCCs "Affordable Connectivity Program".

I didn't make the calculation myself, but a sub-10 year horizon for a project someone seems to do from the goodness of their heart, doesn't seem so bad.

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

#239

Post by thedougd »

Bloating wrote: post #72
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?

There are wholesalers that provide "dark fiber", then you buy data services from another "wholesaler". When I looked into it, dark fiber was available through some utilities and through a government funded non-profit. Data to light-up the fiber was available through several different data centers that connected to that dark fiber. You still had to build-out the last mile though, and thats what will get you. You eithe…

https://www.segra.com/

These guys have dark fiber right in front of my neighborhood. They service cell sites for Dish Network near me as well. It's interesting to look through their services. For example, you can get fiber service with layer 2, where you're responsible for adding your IP stack over top of it. Or you can buy at layer 3, where Segra is already running a stack, and establish mesh connectivity. So if a fiber is cut, you'll get another working path. Build your network over the top.

Pretty interesting to understand what's available.

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

#240

Post by jleahy »

moritonal wrote: post #228
jleahy wrote: post #206

My wife did this, about 6 months of digging up roads in central London. Would recommend. AMA.

As a fellow Londerer please please expand on this. Like, why, what were the returns, what'd you peer into?

Why - 30mbps download and 0.5mbps upload, it was really the upload that was crippling (think video conferencing)

What were the returns - time will tell, but I probably have the best internet in London

What do we peer into - 10Gbps of NTT, two more 1 Gbps full peering sessions, plus the LONAP internet exchange to pick up Google, Netflix, etc. Plus my wife (AS210412) peers with me (AS211289) of course.

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