Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 258 posts

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

#171

Post by frollogaston »

baby_souffle wrote: post #166
frollogaston wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived in all three mentioned areas, none seemed particularly bad unless your standard is fiber straight to home. And seemed like Bay Area had more of that if anything.

I am absolutely not defending Comcast here but its worth pointing out that every anecdotal bit of evidence about performance and reliability can be true. Network performance in that last mile can differ by block and even by season. An otherwise functional run of coax might have intermittent ingress but only shortly after it's rained while cold out. This isn't even counting all of the flaky performance anecdotes that…

In college, we had the combination of spotty wifi + 10 dudes concurrently torrenting Shrek 2 + jank Android tablets running rogue DHCP servers and taking router's IP + rats chewing through cables, yet every time the internet went down, they called Comcast. And it was never actually Comcast's fault.

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

#172

Post by bcrl »

massysett wrote: post #164
bcrl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main reason is that any service that is not widely used will have gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's always the same handful of customers hitting problems or finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if somet…

> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. Big, evil, hated Comcast has full ipv6, and I doubt any of its customers asked for it either. Instead people complain they’re only getting a /60.

Comcast was forced to go to IPv6 because they ran out of IPv4 addresses in the private address space to use for management of their network (think of how each and every cable modem needs a an address for management in addition to all the routers and CMTSes). I was a fly on the way inside one of the router vendors when this took place more than 15 years ago.

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

#173

Post by bcrl »

universa1 wrote: post #133
mschuster91 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, here in Germany you got the same issue with trenches. It takes ages to coordinate digging them, I think the worst example simmered for two years until the permits arrived. And then, it's a nightmare because you can't just cut off people's courtyards and parking spots for any time longer than absolutely required, so as soon as you're at depth you gotta cover the trench with steel plates so cars and pedestrians ca…

The fiber installing crews around here go street by street and usually do one street section per day/or two.

Germany also does a lot more construction on main roads at night compared to what we see in North America.

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

#174

Post by dahart »

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…

> 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s

2000Mb / 7200s = 0.278 Mb/s, or 277.8Kb/s

> It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. […] I think it’d get bogged down with 4 people

That’s just burst buffering as fast as it can, you didn’t capture the average. It doesn’t suggest it would slow down with 4 people. 4K on YouTube takes 20Mbps, so to parent’s point, you’ll have plenty of bandwidth to spare if 4 people do this at the same time on a 300Mbps line.

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

#175

Post by bcrl »

mook wrote: post #126
bcrl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge downside to poles where I'm based: permit shenanigans by pole owners that delay projects and allow incumbents to destroy competitors. Granted, some municipalities do the same thing. One local municipality I have to deal with responds to permit requests almost instantly, while another takes weeks of pestering to acknowledge even the most basic of permit requests. For anyone starting out today, I would s…

More importantly, if they go on poles Comcast can "accidentally" cut their lines all the time.

Bell techs have done that and caused outages for customers a number of times. One outage ended up costing close to CAD$7900 to repair that they settled for due to it occurring on a weekend in a rural area during a snowstorm that required third party traffic control to meet the Book 7 requirements (on a weekend at the bottom of a hill in a snowstorm with insufficient visibility for us to work safely while doing a road crossing). Normally that would only be a $1k-2k or so, but traffic control, lack of slack due to the location of the cut and overtime for all parties involved really drove costs up. Less than 30 seconds with a pair of wire cutters can be downright brutal to repair if the conditions hit the worst case.

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

#176

Post by throw0101b »

ta8645 wrote: post #170
throw0101b wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6. How about not having to pay for (as) beefy CG-NAT hardware because people that go to Youtube, Netflix, MetaFace, TikTok, etc , can directly connect via IPv6.

Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only. If you're still going to support ipv4 anyway, the hardware savings might not be too significant.

> Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only.

Even a small number of devices/services not supporting IPv6 can have huge costs:

> Our [American Indian] tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.

* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...

* Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624

Sadly the post is now behind a login: what happened later was Apple donate a bunch of Apple TV devices to the tribal ISP and that cut their IPv4 usage by an order of magnitude (or some ridiculous number) and there were major savings. The ISP then recommended AppleTV to all of their customers to get the best viewing experience (because of the latency/overhead of CG-NAT when streaming video).

So the more you move over the more headroom you have for the broken IPv4-only systems. AIUI, the rollout of MAP-T/E has helped in that things are more stateless, and more work is done at the CPE, but there's still overhead.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #137
wmf wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But in other places it has definitely happened.

In most places, permitting is the most direct and immediate roadblock. If you don't start there, you won't make any progress on the issue. I live in a blue state that actively encourages municipal and cooperative fiber deployment: https://mdbc.us . It's had approximately zero impact outside some rural parts of the state.

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by kube-system »

rayiner wrote: post #137
wmf wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But in other places it has definitely happened.

In most places, permitting is the most direct and immediate roadblock. If you don't start there, you won't make any progress on the issue. I live in a blue state that actively encourages municipal and cooperative fiber deployment: https://mdbc.us . It's had approximately zero impact outside some rural parts of the state.

Well, "deploying fiber" does not equal "starting a residential FTTP ISP". A ton of fiber infrastructure is only offered B2B.

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

#179

Post by RiverCrochet »

observationist wrote: post #154
bayarearefugee wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ISPs offer and how much they offer it for tends to vary wildly region to region. If you live in a region where they have no meaningful competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of places in the US) well bend over and lube up.

They'll vary wildly, as much as they think they can get away with, in the hopes that you will never use the service and pay them as much as possible for it, and they'll bury your mailbox with crap to try to wear you down into coming back. They will happily let you pay for years, for services that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay anything back; th…

A healthcare company I used to work for had a location in CA that, on paper, had 3 circuits - AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Each had their own Ciena box in their telecom closet. They were getting a circuit upgraded so one of them was newly installed and we needed to cut over the slowest one to an upgraded one.

Working with the director there, IIRC we traced down the Verizon and Comcast box as actually being connected to the AT&T box. After some checking of circuit IDs on boxes it seemed that the LEC for both the Verizon and Comcast circuits was AT&T, and AT&T was the actual owner of that single physical fiber going out there.

I wish I could sell the same thing 3 times, lol. Contracts were signed on all these circuits so there was no getting out of it.

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

#180

Post by protocolture »

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?

In my experience with small ISP's they make 99% of their own headaches, the last 1% being provided by the small consultants who work with small ISP.

For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options.

I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre.

70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related.

They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade.

Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.

Post reply on HN