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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

#91

Post by godelski »

freedomben wrote: post #74
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

  > I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate
Just offering some advice if you aren't aware. If you are, freely ignore. (And if you have advice in return I'd love to hear!)

For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0]

rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to balance it depending if you want to be CPU bound or IO bound. You can pick the compression and level, with more options than just the `-z` flag. You can also increase speed by not doing the checksum, or by running without checksum and then running again later with. Or some intervaling like daily backups without and monthly you do checksums.

If you tar your files up first I have a function that is essentially `tar cf - "${@:2}" | xz -9 --threads $NTHREADS --verbose > "${1}"` which uses the maximum `xz` compression level. I like to heavily compress things upstream because it also makes downloads faster and decompression is much easier than compression. I usually prefer being compute bound.

Also, a systemd job is always nice and offers more flexibility than cron. It's what's helped me most with the wack-a-mole game. I like to do on calendar events (e.g. Daily, Weekly) and add a random delay. It's also nice that if the event was missed because the machine was off it'll run the job once the machine is back on (I usually make it wait at least 15 minutes after machine comes online).

[0] https://rclone.org/

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020

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

#92

Post by dilyevsky »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #84
dilyevsky wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.

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

For regular folks there isn't much benefit tbh. Mainly I think it simplifies ISP architecture and offers slightly faster (like 10%) performance but ISPs have to support IPv4 stack for foreseeable future anyway so kinda moot point. If you game a lot p2p (i don't) you should, in theory, see lower lag.

For me personally, I work on networking startup so I'd like to be able to run IPv6 stack from my home network to test things.

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

#93

Post by mschuster91 »

bcrl wrote: post #68
mschuster91 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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…

There's a huge downside to poles where I'm based: permit shenanigans by pole owners that delay projects and allow incumbents to destroy competitors. Granted, some municipalities do the same thing. One local municipality I have to deal with responds to permit requests almost instantly, while another takes weeks of pestering to acknowledge even the most basic of permit requests. For anyone starting out today, I would s…

Meh, here in Germany you got the same issue with trenches. It takes ages to coordinate digging them, I think the worst example simmered for two years until the permits arrived. And then, it's a nightmare because you can't just cut off people's courtyards and parking spots for any time longer than absolutely required, so as soon as you're at depth you gotta cover the trench with steel plates so cars and pedestrians can cross...

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

#94

Post by amethyst »

radley wrote: post #47
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.

Bay Area has sonic.net with unlimited 10Gb down & 1Gb up for only $40.

*parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of course.

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

#95

Post by bcrl »

Sanzig wrote: post #73
bcrl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.

That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.

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

#96

Post by Dotnaught »

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)…

In most of San Francisco and parts of the East Bay, there's MonkeyBrains: https://www.monkeybrains.net/

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

#97

Post by kube-system »

no_wizard wrote: post #75
ecshafer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32 million customers, that means you might get tens of thousands of calls about it.

But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.

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

#98

Post by kube-system »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #90
icedchai wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After fixing internet for some neighbors and older relatives, I've wondered if people would pay for a home network / internet handyman service. It's super frustrating, especially for older folks. They often confuse their email passwords, ISP passwords, wifi setup, etc. Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP.

Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP. If you want a landline to call emergency services, I'd expect a real landline will have higher uptime than one that depends on your router.

VoIP doesn't necessarily require your router to be up.

For example, if you subscribe to Verizon FiOS voice, the technician will disconnect your copper phone lines and connect them to VoIP termination on your ONT.

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

#99

Post by dietr1ch »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #80
nkellenicki wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the Bay Area Comcast offered (2017-2023 at least) internet with a default 1-1.2TiB/mo data cap that you can lift for the month for an extra 10-20usd (I don't recall, my roommate who played CoD was the one paying for this by himself on every month with huge updates).

There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.

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

#100

Post by bcrl »

mrweasel wrote: post #77
bcrl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 worth spending money to replace them when customers are going to migrate to fibre soon enough.
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