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

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

#221

Post by immibis »

frollogaston wrote: post #139
rayiner wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it's good enough that not very many people care. I moved around San Jose, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Sunnyvale, never noticed problems with Comcast or AT&T. Was expecting flakiness after hearing all these bad stories, but no, it was reliable. What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.

CGNAT isn't a matter of cheapness. There are more Internet users than IP addresses. Someone has to draw the short straw, and that's the providers that came late to the party.

Now, if they're doing CGNAT and also don't have IPv6, that's just crap. They shouldn't be allowed to call themselves an ISP at that point.

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

#222

Post by immibis »

protocolture wrote: post #184
immibis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Otherwis…

>Wireless service is always worse Look, wireless service is almost guaranteed to be worse, but that has more to do with dodgy operators. The technology is fantastic, and when engineered correctly largely undetectable. That said, in my time, I can count on one hand the number of installations where I was allowed to engineer the service correctly. And I can count on all the hands in a small city the number of times I h…

You can create a great wireless link. It still won't beat a great fiber link. I'm sure the best wireless links beat the worst fiber links, but...

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by eythian »

simoncion wrote: post #128
PantaloonFlames wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance but what is the benefit to ipv6 for local, consumer internet?

The big customer-visible feature is that every machine on their LAN can be globally reachable. For ISPs that absolutely cannot get enough IPv4 space to give their customers even a single globally-reachable IPv4 address, this would be the only way to get any global IP space. IME, edge routers that are intended for networking noobs to use often set up their firewalls so that they block inbound unsolicited IPv6 traffic,…

My feeling with privacy extensions is that it's more to prevent enumeration of a network by looking at outgoing traffic. It may have a degree of tracking protection too, but that's probably less important, and is about equivalent to everything being behind a single NAT address.

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

#225

Post by eythian »

sleepydog wrote: post #53
beeb wrote: post #43

Wow the US really has it bad when it comes to home internet. In many European countries, you can get symmetric Gbit internet for 30-40 EUR (probably less in some places), and I haven't seen a data cap in forever.

The EU is better on average, but isn't universally great either. I pay 60 EUR for 200Mbit down/20Mbit up ADSL in Amsterdam, after my 6-month discount ran out. No fiber in my neighborhood yet. There's one gigabit provider in my neighborhood (Ziggo) and they have a bad reputation. For the same price I was getting FiOS gigabit in NYC.

I have 1.1Gb/100Mb on Ziggo in Amsterdam. I've had no real issues with them, at least for me the reputation is undeserved. I pay a bit more than that, but like €20 or so. They also give me a /57 or something which is nice (if a weird allocation, but I'm not going to use that many subnets anyway.)

I have had a fibre cable poking out of the footpath in front of my apartment for a year or two now, waiting for ODF or whoever to come and install it into the building.

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

#226

Post by bcrl »

nulbyte wrote: post #190
bcrl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring their existing or own wireless routers along and occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable. Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no modern replacements -- it's just not wor…

I don't think GP meant static addressing but literally, how many ask for IPv4 service? None, because you just provide it; it's an unstated expectation. Now apply that to IPv6 and you can see the point that (I think) GP is making. Side note: The claim it is not widely used doesn't track. How many people use Google or Facebook? More than half of that traffic is over IPv6. https://circleid.com/posts/ipv6-usage-in-the-u.…

I know that the GP wasn't asking about static IP addresses, however I was merely providing some statistics about what customer asks regarding IP addresses are actually seen on the provider side of things.

It's not widely used in my customer base as well as among a number of other small independent ISPs I know of. A significant number of the CPE we have deployed today do not support IPv6, therefore a significant number of our end users will not be using IPv6 resulting in only partial usage. That is what I am referring to: an incomplete deployment of IPv6 across a customer base without their knowledge of change and the end user's ability to identify issues will cause support issues which costs money and time.

Because of how IPv6 is provisioned, going from a no IPv6-deployed state to fully-deployed state will encounter transition issues. It's not provisioned the same way as IPv4, and that's the whole bloody problem!!! Sure, I can turn on handing out IPv6 addresses from our edge routers via PPPoE today, but it's not going to "Just Work" for all customers without CPE config changes (assuming the CPE even supports IPv6 in the first place for which a bunch of them do not!). It's a complete pain that has less than zero benefit for a small provider today since everything is available over IPv4 and nothing is IPv6 only. Heck, another ISP I know had a customer ask for IPv6 support, and then the customer didn't even bother to provision it on their own router!

Another example: take Ubiquiti's AirCube product line. It doesn't support IPv6. To deploy IPv6 it would be necessary to reconfigure things to make the ONU for the customer act as the router for the customer's home network and place the AirCube in bridged mode. That's assuming that the ONU even supports IPv6 yet as it did not when I looked into it on the order of 6 years ago. And yes, there are a few dozen customers on AirCubes that fall under this case. This means moving into a territory where multiple different CPE deployment configs are now required for less than zero benefit.

That there are gaps in IPv6 support has been a problem, is a problem, and will continue to be a problem. The industry isn't 100% IPv6, and I don't see how that is going to be the case in the next 5 years or even the next 10 years. Consumer gear isn't there yet. That was the problem 5 years ago, that was the problem 10 years ago, that was the problem 15 years, and that was the problem 20 years ago... What's different today that's any different than yesterday?

It's easy to deploy IPv6 in data centers where you control all the infrastructure on servers where operating system IPv6 support was mature decades ago. It's not so easy as a small ISP when dealing with pile of random consumer gear that an ISP's customers bring to the table where IPv6 support remains hit and miss.

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

#227

Post by bcrl »

rendaw wrote: post #192
bcrl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring their existing or own wireless routers along and occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable. Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no modern replacements -- it's just not wor…

So when you said `ask for IPv6` you meant `ask for a static IPv6 prefix` or something else similar to a static IPv4 address? Or is this an apples to oranges comparison? And then you say `Nobody asks for IPv4` - so nobody asks for IPv4 and 0.5% ask for IPv6?

2 of my customers explicitly asked for IPv6 prefixes. Another ISP had a couple of users actively using IPv6 15 years ago, but it bitrotted and nobody cared enough to ask for it to be fixed. Another user recently asked to be provided with IPv6 (actually, forcefully demanded it rater) and then didn't even bother to enable IPv6 on their router.

So, yeah, I don't see IPv6 being relevant as a small ISP today.

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

#228

Post by bcrl »

Sanzig wrote: post #199
bcrl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not doing CGNAT. We were able to get enough IPv4 addresses directly from ARIN a few years ago after being on the waiting list for a couple of years. It's a pity that widespread fraud depleted that pool faster than it should have been. CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors tha…

Ah, okay, well if you already have the IPv4 address space available for all your customers that's a different story. I can understand why you want to wait to dual-stack in that case. I do think NAT64/464XLAT is a pretty good architecture for new ISPs that can't get their hands on IPv4 space, though. Or even MAP-T, but CPE support isn't really there yet.

CPE support is the issue and has always been the issue! People assume that IPv6 is done, but it really isn't in the consumer networking gear product space.

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

#229

Post by bcrl »

supertrope wrote: post #203
Sanzig wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you already have to do CGNAT, why not IPv6 as your core network with NAT64 at the border and 464XLAT on the CPE? It gives you best of both worlds.

Android and iOS have pressure on app developers to support IPv6 or at the very least function on 464XLAT. On home broadband people could connect anything including programs that use literal IPv4 addresses and break on 464XLAT. Things like corporate VPNs, Skype, online gaming. Ironically these services would benefit the most from supporting IPv6 but they've evolved to deal with IPv4 NAT to the extent that they've beco…

Great: your client device supports IPv6 while your consumer networking gear does not. How's that going to work exactly?

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

#230

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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