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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

#331

Post by aisengard »

zzzeek wrote: post #327

> Jared Mauch is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money. > Mauch told us he provides free 250Mbps service to a church that was previously having trouble with its Comcast service. That's interesting, he's taking money from the government and giving free internet to a religious organization? Do all "churches" get free internet or just the ones he prefers? Taxpayers are OK subsidizing a specific chu…

I know this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. If someone can prove he's discriminating against institutions on the basis of religion, he can be sued. Whether he takes money from the government or not doesn't matter in the slightest.

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

#332

Post by jononomo »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #219
jononomo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A+ comment. I've been hearing this idea that "there is no such thing as a 10x engineer" for almost a decade now and from the very first moment I heard it I considered it one of the most definitively untrue ideas circulating in the tech industry. In fact, there are 100x engineers.

The reason people say it's a myth is because the study that purported to identify this concept was found to have an extremely small population and confounding factors. In addition if I remember correctly it tried to do this identification by using a contrived programming problem. There are obviously software devs who are more productive than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is thinking that (a) comp…

First, the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type is not a 10x dev. Arrogance is a sign of insecurity.

Second, I don't think a team of ten 1.5x programmers will beat out a 10x programmer. You either have the depth of understanding and imagination or you don't. Take Linus Torvalds, for instance -- I would say he is a 100x programmer, or perhaps a 10,000x programmer, since he is the author of both Git and Linux -- good luck trying to replicate that contribution with a "well managed team". It is similar in many areas -- 10 guys with Math PhDs do not make one Einstein.

In the context of hiring for a business that is developing a CRUD app, you're usually trying to differentiate between 1x programmers and 0.1x programmers, however -- 10x programmers aren't often looking for work.

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

#333

Post by toomuchtodo »

pessimizer wrote: post #319
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 going to skate past the fact that difficult customers and maintenance aren't why monopolies are expensive, in fact they're the things that are most amenable to economies of scale, so bigger gets cheaper . The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal have to be to defeat and replace Comcast rather than to supply internet service to his ne…

He doesn’t of course. Local/muni/coop last mile is a well worn path. It’s your local volunteer fire department, but for internet, and local self reliance is not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to grow, it doesn’t have to constantly evolve, it just has to work and be reliable. That is what infrastructure does, and when it does so, it’s mostly invisible (and I argue, that is its most beautiful form).

https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/

https://muninetworks.org/

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

#334

Post by iforgotpassword »

samstave wrote: post #261
kalleboo wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's like setting up a giant LAN party, but for grown-ups, doing serious grown-up stuff.

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

#335

Post by nomel »

supernova87a wrote: post #320
dimitrios1 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -- 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…

> 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 . Then isn't this a point against the scalability / feasibility of this idea working broadly for others or becoming a model for replacing dumb telcos? If part of…

> Then isn't this a point against the scalability

The technical solution would be a QOS that deprioritizes/throttles these people first, with clear wording in the contract. The reality is that these people are a negligible fraction of the users.

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

#336

Post by justrudd »

mattnewton wrote: post #300
jedberg wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that's OPs point. If he does what you say, he's no better than Comcast, ignoring customers and telling them to screw themselves at the first sign of trouble.

There’s still a country mile between what gp is suggesting and what Comcast gets away with because of their monopoly position. Anecdotally, I replaced a router they gave me because it would randomly crap out (probably neighbors using the xfinity Wi-Fi feature I couldn’t turn off), and they kept trying to charge me a monthly rental fee for their router. Every time I would call with confirmation it had been returned, t…

This happened to me as well with Cox Cable in AZ back in the early 2000s. I returned the modem and got the returned receipt. Next 6 months I had to call and get them to reverse the charges. At that point, I started recording all the calls each time I had to call and get the charge reversed. Recorded 5 months of calls, had them transcribed, and sent the transcriptions, recordings, and a copy of the return receipt to the AG’s office saying “I believe Cox is committing fraud, and I wonder how many people they’re doing this to”. Never heard from Cox again. I did actually wonder how many people just continued paying it because “it’s just $5 a month”

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

#337

Post by gvb »

gvb wrote: post #48
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…

> Perhaps a Starlink connection would have been enough for them and perfectly fine if it's a single family. Oh the irony... Starlink is also tapping (federal) government subsidies to provide internet service to rural areas. Tapping government subsidies is a very important part of Starlink's plan to become profitable. Ref: "SpaceX's Starlink wins nearly $900 million in FCC subsidies to bring internet to rural areas" h…

...or not: "FCC denies Starlink’s application for $885M subsidy" (breaking news)

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/10/fcc-denies-starlinks-appli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32417587

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

#338

Post by vineyardmike »

treis wrote: post #316
kevin_nisbet wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

Telcos aren't really that great of profit making machines. It's a capital intensive business that requires a lot of scale before making money. Look at what this guy is doing. Many millions to get 600 customers paying <$100 a month.

His millions were funded by the government.. and the legacy providers also could bid on the contracts. It’s not clear if he’s expected to pay off those funds or not (I assume not). As the saying goes, the best money is someone else’s.

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

#339

Post by gridspy »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #308
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 rea…

It seems that the ISP motivation comes from lack of other options. Should a viable competitor emerge, that might be considered a "win" w.r.t rural customers having good broadband choices.

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

#340

Post by bitcoinmoney »

Spivak wrote: post #305
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.

Is he running the tower as a business?
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