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

arstechnica.com

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

#261

Post by samstave »

kalleboo wrote: post #248
supernova87a wrote: post #241

I greatly respect the initiative and scrappy-ness of someone doing this. And the legacy providers are clearly sitting on their monopoly position in a way that makes their pathetic alternative so starkly unattractive. But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do this cheaply? N…

There are lots of ISPs that don’t suck

FblQ00Ho

That was my first ISP password assigned to me from San Jose based ix.netcom.com (Also the city I was grounded a month for running a $926 long distance bill calling into BBSs to play trade wars and the pit)

But the best ISP I ever had was a 56K dial-up in Seattle. To play Diablo.

I am looking to build an ISP.

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

#262

Post by the_watcher »

capableweb wrote: post #238
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.

Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).

Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!

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

#263

Post by jeremyjh »

welterde wrote: post #167
jeremyjh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that those investments will be usable by anyone who wants the service and can setup the antenna. Where-as a half mile fiber run to your house in the boonies can only ever be useful to you.

The subsidy is for the company though and not this specific fiber run, which was a sort of worst-case. The company is quite limited in geographical scope, so they got a fairly small subsidy, while Starlink is much larger in scope and thus got a larger one. Also that fiber run will remain useful for far longer than the Starlink satellites. It's pretty much a one-time cost with negligible operating cost, whereas Starli…

One way or another, tax payers spent $30K on a fiber run to one house. Yes, they spent less on some other ones too. The indirection just increases cost insensitivity.

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

#264

Post by colechristensen »

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.

https://usinternet.com/fiber/plans-pricing/

Come to Minneapolis. 1 Gbps for $70.

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

#265

Post by colechristensen »

pphysch wrote: post #233
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?

Well the US economy has boomed for the last 250 years or so and depends pretty heavily on roads and thirsty humans. Those investments seem to have given more than they took, by a very wide margin.

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

#266

Post by dimitrios1 »

supernova87a wrote: post #241

I greatly respect the initiative and scrappy-ness of someone doing this. And the legacy providers are clearly sitting on their monopoly position in a way that makes their pathetic alternative so starkly unattractive. But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do this cheaply? N…

> -- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before

Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or not do business with whoever they want, provided they’re not refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or federal law.

> -- customers who need 24 hour customer service

Also easy. You are under no obligation to meet peoples unrealistic demands or needs.

> -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people

He already is familiar with third party contracting.

> -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits

Frivolous lawsuits are a risk in any business in America.

> -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.

What is this "next technology requirement"? My area cable company still runs most their network on 30 year old lines.

> -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price

Cost of doing business, doesn't matter the size.

I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal broadband can be. It's why big players spend so much lobbying and bribing so they can keep their established position running and keep the gravy train running, but really the economics of it are fantastic once you've done the initial digging and running the lines, which sounds like he has here.

At $55 /mo for 400 households he's bringing in $22,000 a month plus whatever federal and local government subsidies and grants. The odds of a disaster, or one of the other scenarios you mentioned happening anytime soon is low, so he will have runway to build a decent sized war-chest to be able to easily afford handling any of these scenarios with third party contractors. The more houses he brings on line, the better it gets.

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

#267

Post by nodunutshere992 »

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.

Comcast charges $100/mo for 1Gbps where I'm at in a suburb of Salt Lake City. Our city announced a partnership with Google Fiber that will begin rolling out in 6-8 months. After that happened, I've started getting Comcast adverts to sign a 2 year contract...I also expect to see their prices start dropping soon.

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

#268

Post by daniel-cussen »

wyager wrote: post #174
Bloating wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Last mile subsidies are super weird. I was looking at a property in montana in the middle of nowhere that had no electricity nearby, but had gigabit fiber. I called the ISP and it was cheaper to get phone+Gb than just Gb due to subsidy rules. Basically everyone out there (including me) is on starlink now. Turns out the subsidies were not only inefficient, but pretty pointless.

They helped a bit, for a while. Gigabit fiber is less maintenance than electrical power, and it's easier to roll-your-own electrical power than it is to get a Gb connection like how would you do that before Starlink, buy an insane amount of radio spectrum? I heard one HN user who did exactly that in Brazil, got a 20-meter tower to connect by radio to the internet some distance away, and it was a very solid high bandwidth connection. But still much harder than a generator and solar panels, or a tiny little hydropower generator on a stream (a great option in places like Southern Chile, not a joke by any means). Or wind.

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

#269

Post by ViViDboarder »

asiachick wrote: post #243
jrajav wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

given the state of the roads and streets in most places in the usa I have very little confidence that public internet will keep up with maintenance, upgrading the equipment to the lastest speeds and standards every 5 yrs. Commercial ISPs have issues and they should not be given local monopolies but even shitty Comcast is better today than it was yesterday. The same is not true of most of the roads in my state.

My experience is a bit different. The roads where I live (San Francisco) are better than my AT&T options. Roads here seem to be repaved every 5-10 years and AT&T still doesn’t offer a plan that the FCC would classify as broadband to my house.

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

#270

Post by fragmede »

brianwawok wrote: post #50
burntsushi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You get bigger machines, which do work faster.

And you dig smaller trenches with them. Microtrenching digs a foot deep and two inch wide hole for direct bury fiber cable, saving time and money over older techniques.
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