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Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

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Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#421

Post by devmunchies »

wyattpeak wrote: post #399
devmunchies wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for every small business that "gets by", there are 2 (probably more) that go out of business due to not having grown sufficiently by the time they face some competition.

I think this is a weird framing of the issue. Sure, lots of businesses go under, and maybe being larger would have saved them, but maybe not. Plenty of VC-funded businesses go under precisely because they tried to be too large, when they could have perfectly comfortably served a few satisfied initial clients for enough money to pay all their bills. I think the idea that companies go under because they aren't ambitiou…

When I say growth I mean net profits. Those imploding VC companies were never profitable.

A larger profitable company has more chance of survival by shrinking into a smaller profitable company. It's a buffer. But an already small profitable company doesn't have that option, there's more risk.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#422

Post by jquery »

fragmede wrote: post #278
jquery wrote: post #202

Meanwhile I live in San Francisco and I still can’t get affordable symmetric gigabit fiber internet to my home.

More frustrating is to chart how close you actually are to gigabyte symmetric. AT&T and Sonic has wired up large parts of the city but if they don't serve you, it's often by just a block or two, depending on where you are in the city. Rumor has it that local ISP MonkeyBrains is also getting in on the fiber game.

Yeah. A couple blocks away Sonic has wired up the entire neighborhood. I've been begging them to wire up my street for years with no luck. I used to be a customer but switched to Monkeybrains because I couldn't take dsl speeds any longer.

Monkeybrains is my favorite ISP, I currently use them. Affordable and reliable. A couple hiccups over the past few years (my internet speed was cut by 80-90% for a day or two) but resolved with a phone call. Nothing so bad as Comcast regularly becoming nigh-unusable at peak times.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#423

Post by jquery »

Ancapistani wrote: post #413
jquery wrote: post #202

Meanwhile I live in San Francisco and I still can’t get affordable symmetric gigabit fiber internet to my home.

That's nuts to me. I live in a town of ~15k people in a Southern state, and I have symmetric gigabit. Granted, I pay ~$110/mo, but I have the option of symmetric 300Mbps for ~$50/mo. Neither plan has a data cap. Then again, I chose my home based on the local ISPs' physical network topology. I didn't rely on their service maps, either - I physically went to their installation folks and got a copy of their maps.

$110 absolutely falls under "affordable" gigabit. If I want symmmetric gigabit, I can get it, with a Comcast business plan. But last I checked it was in the $four-figure range.

I pay around $35/mo for 100Mbps symmetric using a microwave satellite on my house's roof.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#424

Post by the_watcher »

boplicity wrote: post #366
pessimizer wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's serving 600 households afaik, not offering service to 600 households. So the assumption is that there's a 0% attrition rate. Pretty safe assumption for monopolies, or for local services with half the price and 5x the bandwidth of the other choices.

We're talking about the ROI on the 417 houses he's installing access for, not his total customer base. 2.6m / (417*(55+30)) = months to $2.6 million in revenue. However, the assumption was that all 417 houses connected will become customers. That's a pretty big assumption. The actual percentage could be 50% or 90%. I don't know -- but surely the answer will have a big impact on the time it takes to reach that amount…

Going from 0 to 1 internet providers is likely to have an extremely high conversion rate assuming affordable pricing and quality. While it's anecdotal, I have personal experience with this. My family is from rural eastern WA and spends the summer in the mountains up there. Until 2020, the only internet service option was HughesNet, which was extremely expensive and very low quality, as it's a notoriously rugged region that's difficult to serve (it's still ineligible for Starlink). In 2020, a local was able to get a 5G tower installed (way cheaper and way higher quality). When I had him set us up, he told me he'd already installed it for 60% of the cabins on the chain of lakes our house is on. He expected it to be 100% by 2022.

All that said, my experience does remind me that many of the people up there turn it off for the winter, when they aren't there. My assumption is that there'd be some amount of desire to do that, which would also reduce returns.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#425

Post by system2 »

mrb wrote: post #406
system2 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed Are you saying you paid $18,000 for fiber optic installation at your house?

Yes

Wasn't Cat6 or Cat7 enough? Do you think it was worth spending that much for fiber at home?

Also, do you have any problems with the connectivity or damages? If it is damaged, can you fix it yourself?

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#426

Post by dredmorbius »

cesarb wrote: post #172
hammock wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an ASN and what advantage is there to have a low number?

ASN = Autonomous System Number ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_System_Number ), it's a number which identifies an ISP in the core Internet routing protocol (BGP). A low ASN usually means your ISP has been part of the Internet for a long time; other than the 16-bit vs 32-bit ASN distinction, it has no practical effect, besides implying that your ISP is one of the "old-timers".

Adding to this, Autonomous Systems, which are identified by ASNs, are the networks that the Internet is internetworking between.

That protocol is called BGP, or border gateway protocol. Most people's familiarity with that initialism, if any, comes from reports of major outages which occur when BGP routing --- effectively the list of peers to which a given AS connects --- gets fuxnored. This happens with somewhat distressing regularity (though not exceptionally high frequency), and along with some other notable failure points in modern telecoms (say, SIM spoofing, DDoS, or good old social engineering) is not-so-charmingly naive in its architecture of implied trust and lack of technical safeguards against either accident or malice.

As originally specified, ASNs ranged to 65,536 distinct systems (16 bits). That's since been bumped up to 32 bits, for 4,294,967,296 distinct systems.

Some old hands would track network abuse by ASN or a somewhat finer gradation, CIDR (classless internet domain routing), which tend to aggregate poorly-behaved networks into identifiable aggregates. That was somewhat more tenable with the smaller number of providers, though power laws and Zipf functions mean that bad behaviour does stil tend to self-organise in useful ways. Growth in indirection (VPNs and Tor) challenge this somewhat, with gateways now being identified as abuse sources, which is ... problematic.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#427

Post by MichaelZuo »

mrunkel wrote: post #407
YeBanKo wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we are asking why questions. Why does everyone else have to support them with tax money when it costs 30k to run a wire to a house? If there is no prospect of scaling it further to boost local infrastructure, then they should be footing the bill themselves or use Starlink.

Because we as a society are better when everyone has access to the Internet. Just as we ran electricity and running water to neighborhoods that could never pay back the investment. Just like we build roads, bridges, and tunnels that probably never be afforded by the people they serve. Maybe the person that lives in that house in the next generation is the next great scientist that discovers how fusion can work reliab…

This is the most bizarre comment I’ve seen in a while. You don’t think folks do cost-benefit analysis before building out infrastructure? If so, you are in for quite a surprise when you attend a hearing at your local municipality.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#428

Post by MichaelZuo »

icedchai wrote: post #355
jonathantf2 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why there's so many weird domains being hosted on AS2? https://dnslytics.com/bgp/as2 (scroll down to Top Domains)

They are probably not actually hosted on AS2. Bad actors can inject garbage into BGP AS paths, either accidentally or deliberately.

Bad actors aren’t blacklisted for repeatedly injecting garbage?

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#429

Post by mrb »

system2 wrote: post #425
mrb wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

Wasn't Cat6 or Cat7 enough? Do you think it was worth spending that much for fiber at home? Also, do you have any problems with the connectivity or damages? If it is damaged, can you fix it yourself?

Not only cat6 or cat7 wouldn't have worked at a length of 1000 feet (one would need repeaters, which can and did fail, see my initial post), but it wouldn't have saved much money. The bulk of the cost was in the labor to hand-dig a trench through rocky soil while avoiding multiple buried utilities. Also, cat6 and cat7 would have been slower at 1 Gbps (10 Gbps is impossible at 1000 feet with repeaters). My fiber cable has 12 strands of singlemode fiber and each can achieve 100 Gbps with the right SFP transceiver (1200 Gbps total). Of course I don't need that much bandwidth, but it's a plus to have this potential.

There is basically no reason whatsoever to stick with cat6 or cat7 at such lengths. Fiber beats copper in weight, speed, and reliability.

The whole project was worth it. This allowed me to install video intercoms at two gates, and many security cameras, which is what buyers want at such a property (it's a multi-million dollar estate, and I might want to sell it next year).

If the line were to be damaged somehow, I would need to call my contractors to splice and repair it. But I don't expect it to happen. In fact the line shouldn't need any maintenance over the next 20+ years. Heavy-duty conduit. Heavy-duty weather-proof enclosures for the patch panels. Etc. It's all the same stuff built by the same contractors who build fiber infra for ISPs.

Re: Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

#430

Post by thehappypm »

LatteLazy wrote: post #129
thehappypm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us vs them is not cool. Every lifestyle has value.

That's fine, as long as you will pay the same sums to support whatever weird lifestyle choices I make...

“Sums”?
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