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

Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

chrishacken.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#51

Post by dboreham »

chrishacken wrote: post #50
dboreham wrote: post #48

As a one-time dabbler in the local ISP business I found this fascinating but I also wanted to scream "Nooooo...stop" as I read! There are contractors who spend every day digging up streets, laying conduit. FFS use one of them to do the job rather than messing around looking for a Bobcat with the right Diamond saw attachment. Another thing I'd worry about is that there may be fiber in the ground or on poles already in…

I’m already well aware there’s fiber on poles here. The difference is, their network isn’t built to support FTTH, it’s built to support a few larger enterprises that are willing to pay $3,000/m for a circuit. Name one person that doesn’t want fiber internet. Saying there isn’t a big enough market for service when literally every single household and business purchases internet is ridiculous. We already have 60% of th…

>Saying there isn’t a big enough market for service when literally every single household and business purchases internet is ridiculous.

I certainly wish you good luck but I suspect that you are missing something if you think you're going to compete with national providers who have access to billions in capex and infinite marketing budget, selling a product where almost no customer understands the fine details of QoS and customer service (which are the only ways in which you can differentiate your offering).

fwiw we have dedicated fiber loop (not ftth) providers here (middle of nowhere, USA) who will deliver service for $600/mo with low or zero install charge so I question your $3k/mo figure.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#52

Post by chrishacken »

treis wrote: post #44
hpcjoe wrote: post #34

I enjoyed reading the first part of this last year, and was thinking of it recently. As someone who built a bootstrapped company from $40k/y revenue through $3.5M/year over 14 years, before we were shot in the head by our bank, I was thrilled to hear that you were doing something like this, but concerned over the many potholes (pun, I guess, intended) you were going to encounter. One of the biggest ones that was an e…

>I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything. >Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale. I'm pulling for him too, but I have the awful feeling that I'm reading the story of a guy blowing his savings, ruining his credit, and maybe taking…

We're a profitable company doing over a quarter million a year ATM. We aren't running fiber on a whim.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#53

Post by hpcjoe »

chrishacken wrote: post #52
treis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything. >Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale. I'm pulling for him too, but I have the awful feeling that I'm reading the story of a guy blowing his savings, ruining his credit, and maybe taking…

We're a profitable company doing over a quarter million a year ATM. We aren't running fiber on a whim.

We were too. Until we needed to expand to meet a customers needs. Then we had to take on debt.

As I said, a cautionary tale. Call me the ghost of startups past :/

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#54

Post by [deleted] »

chrishacken wrote: post #52
treis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything. >Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale. I'm pulling for him too, but I have the awful feeling that I'm reading the story of a guy blowing his savings, ruining his credit, and maybe taking…

We're a profitable company doing over a quarter million a year ATM. We aren't running fiber on a whim.

[deleted]

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#55

Post by jiveturkey »

200 subscribers with 90% coverage of a town-sized city (40k population)? sounds absolutely horrible.

but I really came here to comment on what I think is a financial error: rent vs buy cost. yeah, it seems more expensive to rent if you consider long term ownership of equipment, but this is very misguided. maintaining, repairing, insuring and just storing heavy equipment that you use rarely is just not the way to go. it's cheaper to rent.

> nothing to show for the nearly $10,000 in rental fees

you have no long term expenses to show for it. that's a wonderful tradeoff.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#56

Post by notriddle »

scarface74 wrote: post #35

So what is his competitive advantage over the incumbent providers - the cable company and the phone provider? Is he offering service in areas they aren’t? https://www.broadbandsearch.net/service/pennsylvania/scranto...

He's doing fiber optic. They're doing DSL and cable.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#57

Post by sathackr »

davidu wrote: post #37
chrishacken wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Mimosa, one of the hardware vendors we use, does actually have this built-in to their firmware. The issue is, from what I've seen, is that it hops around too much. It also moves to congested channels sometimes. I'm sure there's a way to perfect it, we just don't have the time at the moment (I also don't believe they provide full API access yet, so I'm not even sure if we can change it without creating an automated…

A founder of Mimosa (CTO Jaime) is a friend of mine. I'll try to direct him to this thread.

I really wanted them to work.

I've tried to get their attention before and it winds up being a constant loop with Support. The B11s work good enough that it's not worth my time to chase the last couple hundred Mb/s. I just gave up on the B5.

10 We need you to connect these to the cloud so we can monitor them.

20 Okay we see your monitoring data, we will circle back in a month

30 Hey try this latest firmware update.

40 Are you sure the antennas are aimed right?

50 Try replacing the cables

60 Oh, your chains are unbalanced by 3db, that's the problem.

70 GOTO 20

By about the 3rd iteration we replaced the B5s with Airfiber using the same antenna and haven't touched it since. I've just accepted that the B11 link won't hit its advertised speed and quit spending time/money on it since we are putting in fiber soon.

I pulled the B5s back off the shelf a few months ago just to see if maybe newer firmware would fix, and once again a tiny bit of interference dropped a link that was doing 1.2Gb/s to 7mb/s or less.

I'm testing some B24s in a real-world link in a couple of weeks. I hope they do what they're supposed to.

Feel free to contact me via email -- my username at gmail

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#58

Post by rashomon »

chrishacken wrote: post #50
dboreham wrote: post #48

As a one-time dabbler in the local ISP business I found this fascinating but I also wanted to scream "Nooooo...stop" as I read! There are contractors who spend every day digging up streets, laying conduit. FFS use one of them to do the job rather than messing around looking for a Bobcat with the right Diamond saw attachment. Another thing I'd worry about is that there may be fiber in the ground or on poles already in…

I’m already well aware there’s fiber on poles here. The difference is, their network isn’t built to support FTTH, it’s built to support a few larger enterprises that are willing to pay $3,000/m for a circuit. Name one person that doesn’t want fiber internet. Saying there isn’t a big enough market for service when literally every single household and business purchases internet is ridiculous. We already have 60% of th…

Absolutely true. I have property about 30 miles north of WB and Frontier told me they can't get a technician out to replace my service until January.

It would be faster for me to crawl on the ground to the nearest PoP and plugin to a GPON port then it would be for me to wait for them.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#59

Post by rashomon »

INTPenis wrote: post #27

I was recently at BornHack2018, a small security camp for the 3rd summer this year held on the island of Bornholm. The organisers also run BornFiber who are connecting the entire island with optical broadband. BornFiber is a good example of how anyone with the right skill can start a fiber provider here in the nordics. I'm glad to see this philosophy being adopted by the US. However. Once they have fiber they still n…

If only they were on the other side of Denmark. I wanted to bring some fiber to a small German island called Insel Fohr.

Re: Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber

#60

Post by rashomon »

amazon_not wrote: post #36
robertgaal wrote: post #32

Thanks for sharing this! As someone in a fiberless city (Amsterdam), with a monopolistic local provider that's unwilling to expand, this is inspiring.

What happened to Citynet? They were supposed to wire the whole of Amsterdam with open access fiber. Did they stop after the Reggefiber/KPN acquisition?

The cost for micro trenching can be upwards of $200k a building in Manhattan. I would assume dealing with sunken homes, collapsed PoE's and NIMBY folks would make it prohibitively expensive.

But I have no idea why they stopped.

Post reply on HN