I'm kind of surprised how expensive this seems. I always thought NZ ended up paying through the nose for the internet but these prices all seem roughly in line with NZ except they're in USD which is about 1:0.6 right now.
Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
241–250 of 258 posts
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit. Pro poles / open air: - very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania. - easy to get access when you need to do maintenance Con poles / open air: - it looks fucking u…
> […] or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure Manufacturers should print on the sleeve "fibre optic only. no copper". :) > [Buried pros:] Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists. Except for that one old lady who took the country of Armenia off the air: * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman...
> Manufacturers should print on the sleeve "fibre optic only. no copper". :)
Doesn't work, sadly. They just DGAF, cut, rip and go.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#243This "$80 for gigabit fiber, unlimited data" is a problem for me. I want to save money, I don't need a gigabit fiber but there's no other options. If there's $30 for 300Mbps unlimited data (I'm paying $40 for optimum) option, then I'll take it.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Most people just use what their ISP issues. Comcast supports IPv6 and so does their CPE.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
I love how these guys are trying to sort the lack of competition in broadband, stood up and did something about it and all the geeks on HN are upset that they are not doing something that the majority of their customers would not give shit about or even come close to understanding. Everyone here that has started a company to challenge the entrenched monopoly raise your hands please. I understand the tech deeply and t…
Given they have a hundred ish customers its likely at most a couple would even know how to do that, or care. It's just not worth their time to worry about this right now. They seem to be doing just fine
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked in this space for a while, in the US. Outside of the major cities, Internet service falls off extremely quickly. Like, shockingly so: you can be as close as fifty miles from, say Philly or Flagstaff and have zero fiber, zero cell coverage, just nothing. The people who attempt to fill these gaps are commonly rural telephone companies, electric cooperatives, tribal entities, or mom and pop shops where the owne…
In principle, IPv6 core networks can actually be very beneficial for small providers just starting out if they're not able to get IPv4 addresses for their customers and are forced to use CGNAT. In an IPv4-only CGNAT setup, all the traffic has to flow through the CGNAT gateways, and that gear is stupidly expensive. Having IPv6 in the mix means that anything that supports IPv6 (such as most streaming services) won't hi…
AFAIK in Germany for DOCSIS it's common to have DS-Lite in the mode with lightweight 4over6, so the CPE does the NAT and the carrier just range checks the client side IPv4 port to fall within that customer's block.
No state at the carrier; IP:6 native network.
If you buy a full IPv4 you get one for yourself but I expect still through the same tunneling machinery to keep the network IPv6-only.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit. Pro poles / open air: - very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania. - easy to get access when you need to do maintenance Con poles / open air: - it looks fucking u…
those days it's not trench digging (unless it's next to highway with machine that in one pass will trench and lay conduit/cable), it's trench drilling with something like this https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills/ frontier installed fiber in my area using this method. relatively quick and no damage that needs to be "aggressively" paved over.
Can't do that in a century old city street with century old utilities in it.
They dug up the sidewalk with shovels here as a result; though using machinery to move the soil they dug up and handle the asphalt that's covering the sidewalk along part of the street.
Yeah you can directionally drill across a front yard typically; but actual urban areas are just too filled with infrastructure.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
those days it's not trench digging (unless it's next to highway with machine that in one pass will trench and lay conduit/cable), it's trench drilling with something like this https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills/ frontier installed fiber in my area using this method. relatively quick and no damage that needs to be "aggressively" paved over.
Can't do that in a century old city street with century old utilities in it. They dug up the sidewalk with shovels here as a result; though using machinery to move the soil they dug up and handle the asphalt that's covering the sidewalk along part of the street. Yeah you can directionally drill across a front yard typically; but actual urban areas are just too filled with infrastructure.
before drilling there was a team that mapped and marked all underground utilities.
some of the drilling went between front yards (this is where underground vaults are/were), but a bunch was done below sidewalks and across the streets.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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...
>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...
When engineered correctly people tend to have absolutely no idea wireless is involved in their connection. Largely its a self inflicted branding issue. You see wireless being sold as "Fibre Extension" way too often for this reason.
Theres also factors that fibre people never consider, like mean time to restore a service. Even if you have a team of 24/7 engineers ready to mobilise, a fibre break will often take a significantly longer time to restore than a wireless outage.
Re: Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry for ninja edit, yeah I called CGNAT cheap because there are still ways to purchase IPv4 addresses, with caveats.