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Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

arstechnica.com

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Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#101

Post by mananaysiempre »

Sanzig wrote: post #71
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't. For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat. I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows t…

Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.

How would you as a customer tell if they were?

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#102

Post by akerl_ »

teeray wrote: post #28
kube-system wrote: post #3

I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?

ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?

I don’t understand what you mean. If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP.

You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work.

The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#103

Post by freedomben »

godelski wrote: post #91
freedomben wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit more than I have (Starlink), but anytime a kid is downloading a big Steam game or big ISO file or something, everything else slows to a crawl. I also occassionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate. I've tried setting rules/priorities but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole

> I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate Just offering some advice if you aren't aware. If you are, freely ignore. (And if you have advice in return I'd love to hear!) For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0] rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to balance it depending if you…

Thank you! I do love rclone a great deal, and need to start using it more. I mostly use rsync right now because I've got some Contabo storage instances and ssh is already set up, so it's nice and easy, and I've already got the rsync commands burned into memory from decades of use :-) I also typically rsync with the same command to an external hard drive for an on-site backup.

Great tips! I'll definitely be using your tar command

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#104

Post by kayge »

boredtofears wrote: post #11
kube-system wrote: post #3

I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?

Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at least, their support is capable of fully managing your router and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve direct customer needs such as a non-optional gues…

If only 'shibboleet' had caught on -.-

https://xkcd.com/806/

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#105

Post by wijwp »

nkellenicki wrote: post #55
gs17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.

You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...

That's not true. I tried getting unlimited data like 7-8 years ago and they said I needed a business account to get it.

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#106

Post by kube-system »

akerl_ wrote: post #102
teeray wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?

I don’t understand what you mean. If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP. You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work. The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.

> If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP.

In the US, most do. This is a standard part of "in home installation" when first subscribing to service for all of the major providers in the US.

Example: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/sc...

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#107

Post by vel0city »

lstamour wrote: post #85
eurleif wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modem and ONT? I'm under the impression that there's nothing called a "modem" for fiber, and that the ONT serves a similar role. Am I confused?

Can’t speak to this exact circumstance, but more generally: The ONT translates the SFP+ networking to fibre optic, but the modem is still somewhat necessary for logins if you use PPPoE as a wrapper for example. In telecom fibre optic, it often also assigns a particular vlan to internet packets and separate vlans for TV and phone. But I’m not an expert here, just explaining why I needed a modem function in my router a…

I wouldn't really call that a "modem" though, it's not really doing modulation/demodulation work to convert between media types. The terminology I usually hear for the provider's box handling any final authentication and VLAN splitting is usually a "residential gateway", which can be configured to bridge to a client's equipment.

Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#108

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #101
Sanzig wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.

How would you as a customer tell if they were?

Because you'd have native IPv6

Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP

#109

Post by mindslight »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #21
mindslight wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network…

Comcast killed my Internet during an interview video call. Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.

Exactly. That's the kind of logic that only makes sense in a metastasized corpo. The only times my non-incumbent fiber connection has gone down in 8 years have been overnight maintenance windows that only happen maybe a few times per year.
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