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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

#111

Post by tossaway0 »

babypuncher wrote: post #45
nancyminusone wrote: post #19

I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. ~100 customers seems too small for the amount of eff…

Comcast similarly removed their 1.2TB cap in my neighborhood within months of us getting fiber. It's almost like the only reason for the cap was because they could get away with it when there wasn't any competition.

That’s exactly it and they admitted it last week.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...

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

#112

Post by immibis »

teddyh wrote: post #9

I am always baffled by these things. Say there’s a huge company with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is “How did they get that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who must surely have had the idea to compete with them?” But no, these stories are always treating “Hey, let’s start a competing company!” like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of before, and that success is assured.

In the specific case of ISPs I think it's always because you won't make enough money to justify it as a big company, yet the task is too big and complicated to do it as an individual nerd.

The worst part appears to be the physical wiring. If your government has implemented loop unbundling, you're already set (probably need to do some bureaucracy and pay some affordable-at-a-stretch fees to get access to it). Otherwise, or if the loops are just crap, you have to figure out how to physically get a cable to everywhere, a task that is fundamentally laborious and legally fraught, not nerdy at all (unless lawyers are nerds) so nobody wants to do it.

Wireless ISPs are about as popular because of this. Wireless service is always worse, but you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure) at the customer's house and one central location, not all the places leading up to the customer's house. This makes it a whole lot more amenable to individual-nerd or handful-of-nerds setup.

I encourage everyone to at least think about how they would do it.

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

#113

Post by immibis »

bell-cot wrote: post #22
teddyh wrote: post #9

I am always baffled by these things. Say there’s a huge company with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is “How did they get that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who must surely have had the idea to compete with them?” But no, these stories are always treating “Hey, let’s start a competing company!” like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of before, and that success is assured.

> What happened to all the other... There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month. But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These…

The capital for an ISP is surprisingly low. The main problem is getting a physical connection to your customer's house. And that's such an obvious legal minefield that no networking nerd wants to do it.

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

#114

Post by vel0city »

godelski wrote: post #79
sometimes_all wrote: post #49

I understand the need for independent fiber ISPs. But are gigabit speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps connection is way more than enough for a four-person family.

Depends on what you're doing, right? Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of Men). Arriv…

Blu-rays don't do anywhere near 277Mb/s.

First, if it was 2GB * 2 for the source of your recompressed copy, that's 4GB * 8 bits per byte = 32 Gigabits (Gb), or 32,000Mb. Two hours in seconds is 60 * 60 * 2 = 7,200 seconds.

32,000 / 7,200 is 4.444Mb/s. Streaming your 2 hour long 4GB movie could be done with ~5Mbit. A 1Gb/s connection could handle streaming ~200 of these movies.

Going back to Blu-rays as a source, an Ultra HD Blu-ray maxes out at 144Mbit but in reality most movies are encoded at a much lower bitrate. Most movies will cap out around 40-50Mbit. You could do 20 of these straight Blu-ray movies on a 1Gb connection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray#Specification...

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

#115

Post by immibis »

sometimes_all wrote: post #49

I understand the need for independent fiber ISPs. But are gigabit speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps connection is way more than enough for a four-person family.

Gigabit is the slowest reasonable fiber speed. Even 10-gigabit is now very cheap to the point that some gigabit equipment is just 10-gigabit equipment operating at a low speed. They could artificially throttle you to even less, if it made business sense.

It's not a committed rate. Your individual line is a gigabit, but the upstream from your whole block is 10 gigabit so you can't all use it at once. Your guaranteed rate is probably have more like 20-50 Mbps, if that's what's confusing you. But it's extremely rare that everyone tries to use their gigabit all at once.

If it's a Passive Optical Network, you might be sharing a gigabit download with your block - you all share the same fiber - and you get substantially less than a gigabit upload due to the need for timeslotting. Gigabit PON is obsolete though, now you'd get at least 10G PON.

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

#116

Post by yuvadam »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27
nancyminusone wrote: post #19

I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. ~100 customers seems too small for the amount of eff…

> 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…

since tailscale exists, why would you care about cgnat or even pay to escape it?

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

#117

Post by mayli »

mosdl wrote: post #20
Cerium wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed, and customer service is much better.

Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!

I am on it, still a little bit pricer than Comcast, but worth every penny.

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

#118

Post by llsf »

Dotnaught wrote: post #96
yalok wrote: post #8

Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north. AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…

In most of San Francisco and parts of the East Bay, there's MonkeyBrains: https://www.monkeybrains.net/

Does Monkeybrains offer fiber now ?

I have been a customer for 14 years now. Would love to move to higher bandwidth.

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

#119

Post by xmprt »

rayiner wrote: post #76
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #25

"Everything that we're doing is all underground." This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider. A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart. more explainers: New suburban fiber…

I’ve been hearing about “captured government” with respect to fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill isn’t working, because for the most part that’s not the real problem. Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull wi…

If you think internet in the bay area is shit then you haven't seen how bad it can get. Even other large cities within California like LA and SD are worse.

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

#120

Post by llsf »

dilyevsky wrote: post #60
yalok wrote: post #8

Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north. AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…

Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.

Unfortunately Sonic does not cover the whole bay, and certainly not all SF. I am still waiting for Sonic to cover the heart of the City (Eureka Valley).
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