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

arstechnica.com

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

#71

Post by Sanzig »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27
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…

> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't. For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat. I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows t…

Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.

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

#72

Post by manquer »

yalok wrote: post #8

Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north. AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…

It could just be mundane technical debt or just organizational bureaucracy .

I recently moved into Menlo Park and had no problems getting 2.5Gbps from ATT fiber.

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

#73

Post by Sanzig »

bcrl wrote: post #62
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't. For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat. I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows t…

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…

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.

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

#74

Post by freedomben »

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.

That's a bit more than I have (Starlink), but anytime a kid is downloading a big Steam game or big ISO file or something, everything else slows to a crawl. I also occassionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate. I've tried setting rules/priorities but it's a constant game of whack-a-mole

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

#75

Post by no_wizard »

ecshafer wrote: post #6
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?

This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on…

other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers.

I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.

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

#76

Post by rayiner »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #25

"Everything that we're doing is all underground." This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider. A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart. more explainers: New suburban fiber…

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 with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.

Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.

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

#77

Post by mrweasel »

bcrl wrote: post #62
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't. For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat. I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows t…

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

How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.

On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.

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

#78

Post by bcrl »

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?

Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels. Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes. Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT.

With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.

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

#79

Post by godelski »

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). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for compression.

Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].

For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9 encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games, downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this. It also highly depends on the stability of your network connection. You're paying for *UP TO* 300Mbps, not a fixed rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.

[0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen size (e.g. phone).

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

#80

Post by PantaloonFlames »

nkellenicki wrote: post #55
gs17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago. It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.

You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...

I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ?

A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?

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