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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

#301

Post by lsllc »

notatoad wrote: post #287

>"I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served." is this really a valuable use of taxpayer money? sending a wireless link over a half-mile isn't that difficult, surely there's a better way to spend $60k of public money than delivering internet service to two families. especially now that starl…

You can do that with 2 Ubiquiti Nanobeams 5AC gen2's for $130 each and get a ~650Mbps link (source, I've done this a number of times!).

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

TeeMassive wrote: post #218
VTimofeenko wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the more measurable side I would imagine the cost of lines correlates with population density. Running wires to 100 single family homes is way more expensive than running the wires to a district of apartment buildings

In Canada they refuse to capacity because some "cities are too dense"

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by Spivak »

jrajav wrote: post #249
missedthecue wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Costs of deployment and profit margins have nothing to do with it. The US public has subsidized the cost of broadband internet deployment since the very birth of the internet, and continues to do so like clockwork every few years. Private ISPs continue to caress the books to make it seem like they're barely operating at a profit and still need more, without ever having delivered on the last promise. Taxpayers have pa…

The thing I can't really understand if this is the argument is where the money is actually going? With an on paper 11% profit margin it's certainly isn't shareholders, and even if the executives rake it would still be a blip in their total revenue.

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

#305

Post by Spivak »

woah wrote: post #288

This is kind of an interesting illustration of how little people know about how the internet works, and how news is ultimately entertainment. Full respect to the man in the article for the hard work and initiative he took in starting a small independent ISP, but this story is the story of thousands of small ISPs in the US and many more around the world. In a basic sense, this story is not "newsworthy" since there is…

One of my coworkers also did this but went the cell tower route. Had no idea you could just install a cell tower without mountains of red tape and huge expense but hey. Then all his "customers" (i.e neighbors) have antennas on their house pointed right at it and boom, internet. He only had to front the cost of getting the lines run to one location.

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

#306

Post by fragmede »

dataflow wrote: post #186
dboreham wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

> 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.

Then you've not worked in large B2B companies before. Eg Apple pays Google money and Google pays money to Apple, any perceived public rivalry goes out the window as far as business between the two is concerned.

If you're the CEO of Comcast, you've never even heard of this small time ISP, you have far bigger things to spend your time on, and the "upstream" business unit of Comcast really doesn't care what you're doing, so long as your money's green. It's all business. See also: Netflix using AWS despite Amazon having a streaming video service of their own.

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

#307

Post by jleahy »

tinfever wrote: post #304
jleahy wrote: post #206

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

How did you meet your wife with an ASN? Asking for a friend...

We were interns (software engineers) at Deutsche Bank, and unfortunately she didn’t have an ASN back then.

Also some bias shows here - surely the question should be ‘how did you meet your wife with multiple 3 ton excavators’.

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

#308

Post by kevin_nisbet »

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…

I'm not convinced this is the case. The big thing that makes telco's such profit making machines is that wires in the ground are generally a large capital expense that doesn't really provide a great marketplace for competition. But once you've got that infrastructure, it's hard to duplicate. The rest of the equipment and employees relatively aren't that expensive.

So the power is on the provider here, there isn't really another choice for customers if the article is to be believed, no matter how good or bad the company is. Sure there might be disputes with vendors, but that's just part of any business.

The biggest threat IMO is probably some sort of competition. Maybe a big telco decides to wire up the area, although then they would be the second player in the market trying to steal customers who may not be interested in switching. Or if this really is a rural area, things like wireless last mile (basically LTE), Starlink, OneWeb, etc may start to be more compelling options if they get the capacity, latency, and price point to the right spot to be competitive.

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

#309

Post by VTimofeenko »

WorldMaker wrote: post #290
VTimofeenko wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the more measurable side I would imagine the cost of lines correlates with population density. Running wires to 100 single family homes is way more expensive than running the wires to a district of apartment buildings

Depends on how old the apartment buildings are. If the apartment buildings themselves are already wired with fiber (or really good, recent coax) it might be a lot cheaper running a single bundle of wires to services the building. (Keep in mind that ideally you still have one fiber wire per apartment to sell the highest speeds to each apartment, so you aren't necessarily saving on number of cables for 100 apartments v…

To be honest, I only have second-hand experience with running Internet lines in a bunch of Soviet-era apartment blocks. On a lot of building designs there's typically a drop going through all floors that exposes the electricity meters in a common area of the stairwell. The cable would go in either through the underground utility way - most likely electricity or heat lines (central heating FTW) or by air from a neighboring house. There would be a switch in the attic where the connections from apartments would terminate.

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

#310

Post by iptrans »

wil421 wrote: post #104
nixgeek wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can shoot light over SM at distances up to 200km (several important caveats at this distance) and it’s very usual to see spans of between 50-80km.

Looking further you can get a UFiber OLT Terminal for $1,799 that can run 20km and support 1024 clients or 128 ONU CPEs per port. How much would a 200km switch run?

The switch does not care what kind of optics you use. You can use a $50 switch is you like.

The 200 km optics, however, cost about a grand each.

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