He presented at an online nanog event. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo I did enjoy listening.
is he visually impaired? I'm asking because he's presenting using slides including pictures
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
371–380 of 439 posts
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, too, greatly respect the scrappy-ness of this individual. Kudos to him for sticking it to Comcast. That said, I'm not wild about the notion of dropping $30K of our collective money on running fiber to a single home out in the country.
This was during covid lockdowns, right? It wouldn't be fair for the govt to enforce a lockdown and not provide funds/grants for internet infra.
Government money is still our collective money.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well there three tiers of ISPs, each one buying service from the one above them. It's ISPs all the way down, and the higher up you go the more expensive the hardware to run it gets.
At the T1 level it's more completely a mesh type setup, but even lower tier ISPs might set up peering agreements to bypass their main higher tier ISP where it makes sense for cost or service quality reasons. Or refuse to to extract more money as in the comcast vs level1 disputes over netflix traffic a while back
Who is T1, T2 and T3? I really don't see it. Seems like that tiering has aged about as well as the OSI model.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#374I 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 have to presume his marketing costs will be close to zero. On tge other hand, in my area (central NJ) both Comcast and Verizon spend a ton on marketing.
He'll also have zero churn. So that's got to help the bottomline.
Finally, I'm willing to bet it helps raise local home prices as those who had to have proper broadband were effectively excluded from that market. The point being, some homes will be able and will to pay more.
Certainly the future will be different, the comparison to traditional ISPs might not be reliable either.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there is a lot of legal graft in society
What exactly are you advocating as an alternative? Leaving the unserved homes unserved?
"If you object to the government making shoes, he'll accuse you of making everyone go barefoot."
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonsteel/surprise-fo...
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#376...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.
I've long felt that there's a relatively simple formula for productivity:
Productivity = (Time * Effort)^Talent
People like Buckminster Fuller come to mind. Especially because of this quote of his:
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#377" 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. " That's over $11 per feet. That sounds about right. I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed at one of my houses (in the US), going down a very long driveway, with 3 patch panels, 2 at each end and one in the…
You mean "foot" instead of "feet" here surely?
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoever says that never met one and isn't one of them. It's so obvious once you see it
I’ve met people other people called 10x engineers. Once you looked soberly at the development process that illusion has faded every time. Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally formulated it’s meant to be between your worst and best engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot, inattentive, sheltered, or all three. Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in sick. They ha…
I don’t think that “10X” is meant to be taken literally.
Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#379Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
#380I 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, too, greatly respect the scrappy-ness of this individual. Kudos to him for sticking it to Comcast. That said, I'm not wild about the notion of dropping $30K of our collective money on running fiber to a single home out in the country.
I don't see anything wrong with "collectively" deciding that every American citizen should have access to high speed internet access and putting our money where our mouth is. Especially remote areas that are expanding and will become increasingly populated to take advantage of the infrastructure.
For most of us, it doesn't cost anywhere near that much to get access so we can handle the rare costs to build out to remote areas where it's more expensive. That's the benefit of collective money. No one person has to shoulder the burden alone and together we each only chip in a small amount to achieve a massive goal.
America should be heavily investing in building out select remote areas now because we're going to be getting much more crowded in the decades ahead. Climate change is going to force people inland, away from the western US, and cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from around the planet to seek relocation. The US is going to have to do our part to help take many of them in. MI is a pretty good place to expand.