Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network
Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular.
Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...
That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.
This page was 9 seconds of white screen before the entire thing loaded at once. I'm on Starlink. Hopefully you get a chance to correct this in the future, as I'm really supportive of projects like yours, but if the page was linked from a top-5 article or something I would have hit the back button already.
Totally - we're not advertising yet and usually only dealing with very local traffic at the moment, didn't expect to get tens of thousands of hits from linking to it from a hackernews comment!
The backend is an azure appservice running on a single low-spec worker at the moment, wasn't planning on enabling scaling before doing a hard-launch but here we are.
It's currently running on a single azure appworker, you might've hit it during a service autoheal/reset. There's a fair bit of overhead for every connection since it's designed for our subscribers to use and get realtime stats on their connection, was not expecting to get tens of thousands of hits by linking to it in a hacker news comment.
10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools.
However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP.
I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing
(also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)
Frontend is full blazor w/hybrid WASM, almost zero JS, all C#. Browser DOM is controlled by the app service in realtime, I plan on using this as a basis for our subscribers to be able to do live traffic & link stats monitoring, among other things.
Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb
In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those.
I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.
It's not really the size that matters in this case, because the video is loaded after the page is completed, and in theory, ought not be slowing down the page if at all (my cursory examining of the network tab gives me a sort of confirmation).
However, what is indeed slow is the initial load, and the lack of CDN for their static assets (css etc). When the HN effect started eating their resources, these static assets are what hurt their load time the most.
Xfinity's website is like that, it barely loads even using their service. I've had it time out several times, and had to start over, just trying to help my mom pay her bill.
I wonder if there's value in a method by which you slow down traffic by region, while keeping/saving resources alive for faster traffic in a different region (that you actually care about). Surge traffic such as HN frontpage will cause massive amounts of traffic to come in from all over the world, but because this service is only relevant to locals, it would suck to have hurt their speed/experience.
I can scale up our worker count as needed, but we keep it at a minimum since our Azure bills are already insane. Fun tidbit, there's a little counter on the bottom right which tracks live app circuits on the site, we were cracking thousands yesterday, normally it's ~5-10 at most. Did NOT anticipate having this kind of attention from a comment, and we were out climbing in Boulder Canyon when the bulk of the traffic hit the site.
I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.
Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.
I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.
I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.
We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.
> In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."
Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.
802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.
It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.
How does that perform in heavy rain or snow? I've always been told that when dealing with mmWave, attenuation gets pretty bad when dealing with adverse climate conditions, and Boulder is surely no stranger to snow.
Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.
The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.
I'll understand if you don't want to answer this or legally can't answer it. What does a 100gbps circuit cost a month? How about the 10gbps uplinks also?
> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.
If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?
If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).
My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.
>local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it
Nationwide telecomms did that with funds for fiber to the premises as well. I have no idea why these telecomms can take the money and just refuse to provide the services.
Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there.
That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.
Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen.
I’m sure Starlink will consume the oxygen. Good news is they can deliver quickly. Bad news is that strategically it’s a fragile and higher risk offering for critical infrastructure.
It’s really essential to fund or make it feasible for companies to fund broadband. Universal broadband should be a priority.
Rural programs are really successful, until the money runs out. Cities get screwed though — I served on a commission with my city on this topic and the only feasible competition at scale, Verizon, refused to engage unless the city allowed them to pick individual blocks to deploy, which means no servitude for underrepresented people.
Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.
My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.
This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.
Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex.
p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you
Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.
Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda.
Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha
Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost.
It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.
>The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
I legit wish I had known about you a few years ago when writing my thesis. It was about community run broadband internet. I was trying to identify repeatable models for communities who wanted to run their own ISPs to use. This would have been so helpful!
Side note, truly inspirational an something I would love to do in my little village in Ohio.
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking more about your thesis? I am interested in rural internet as well for Native American reservations and both opie's and your comments are inspiring and something I definitely want to read.
I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.
I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).
I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.
Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.
We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
Sonic started as a little local ISP in Santa Rosa, CA.[1] Now it's huge in Northern California.
I have 1GB Sonic bidirectional fiber with unlimited data and could get 10GB if I wanted. The head of Sonic points out that long-haul prices have decreased over the years, and there's no real need for usage limits.
> Sonic has the best customer service of any company ever encountered, and it's not even close. The few times I've had to contact them for assistance, I've been very quickly connected with someone clearly _very_ technical who was able to grok my problem immediately and give clear, cogent, respectful debugging advice and perspective. I do not exaggerate when I say I would gladly pay double their current rate just for the peace of mind of knowing that I can depend on them if I ever need their support again. Not that I often do, because their baseline connectivity/speed is also great.
>
> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.
This has been my experience with our local ISP in Minneapolis as well. Granted, I’ve only ever reached out to them maybe 3 times over 6 years, but each time they’ve been exceptional. No more than two phone rings before a person in our metro area answered, they got me to right person who provided actual good believable information and the situation was fixed. The first time I ever reached out to them, by email, I wasn’t even a customer— I was calling to ask when they would resurface a sidewalk that they had torn up for an install in my neighborhood. The director of operations emailed me back, not with an exact date but with a pretty detailed reason for the delay that was clearly written just for this situation, not a form letter, and then he followed up when the work was scheduled.
> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.
Properly good, human and effective customer service is so rare these days that I tend to trust hyperbolic reviews like these more than others, believing that the person honestly feels that way, having been there myself.
I have their 10G service. I love the company and the people. I remember when I first called them to sign up. At the end of the call with the sales guy I told him that 30 minute conversation was one of the most interesting and fun conversations I had ever had with someone I had just met. It was surreal.
The installer was super nice and great at their job.
Their service is so good I have not had an excuse to talk with anyone else.
Many of my neighbors have switched from Comcast, who I was with for more than 10 years, and hated every second of it. Only AT&T is worse than Comcast, but they are both bottom dwellers.
I had Sonic for a year I spent in San Francisco, it was absolutely amazing and wish that they were everywhere. I can understand that dense areas like SF make it a lot easier to expand, I just wish that density like that wasn't banned on 99% of city land.
This ISP was actually part of a detailed study in my college class on networking. The founder created a singular example of an "open-source ISP" [1], and I am pretty sure you can find his guidance online somewhere if you were inclined to build your own.
I read about “future proofing” and “expansion” possibilities of one’s fiber connection. And related user equipment.
My story is in the opposite direction.
We and everyone else in the neighborhood had symmetrical 1 Gbps installed about 15 years ago. We all paid the ISP for the top tier of full capacity.
During Covid decided to take inventory of our actual bandwidth needs.
Anything that can be deferred doesn’t count. Gone from instant bandwidth requirements are all cloud backups, OTA OS upgrades and apps updates. They need to complete overnight. Overlapping is not a requirement.
Videos are automatically played at 480p or less on iPhones, 720p or less on iPads and 1080p or less on HDTV. We purposely didn’t buy 4K TV because at our viewing distance has no benefits whatsoever. Aggregate peak bandwidth required here is 25 Mbps at a stretch. That is also enough for my wife to work from home.
We don’t deal with large datasets or raw videos over the internet.
So we found ourselves with one cable connected TV and the usual assortment of mobile devices connected to one WiFi 4 1x1 hotspot. At 70 Mbps we never noticed any loss of quality in our digital lifestyle.
After about ten years we replaced the hotspot with one capable of WiFi 5. An overkill but needed the extra port.
Eventually convinced the ISP to lower our subscription to the lowest available tier of 200 Mbps. We don’t notice any difference. We could afford the extra bandwidth. But don’t see the benefits of it.
Gigabit internet, or even >100mbps internet, is burst capacity. Very few people hit gigabit speeds continuously, and those that do often hit either bandwidth caps or fair use policy limitations. It's also why ISPs can use a 10gbps fiber backbone to serve gigabit to 50-100 homes, because the probability of all of those homes capping out their bandwidth at the same time is tiny.
That's also why a lot of supposedly fast ISPs absolutely crumbled when COVID hit. A lot of people started doing video calls in the morning/afternoons, which suddenly sent latency-sensitive, bidirectional, high-bandwidth data to every corner of the network. Upload speeds collapsed, gigabit networks were struggling to hit a couple hundred mbps, and DSL providers downgraded their customers to 2005 in terms of attainable network speeds.
For that reason, I think ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default. Their customer base is not going to make use of that capacity anyway. Only when downloading a new game, or doing a backup, or uploading a video file somewhere, does that bandwidth become a necessity. If you remove the cap on the bandwidth side, all of that capacity will remain available for a longer period of time for all of the other people in the neighbourhood.
Some cellular providers used the same reasoning for their plans here a few years back: there were no 4G speed caps, just upload/download as fast as you can, because if you're done doing your file transfer quicker, you're clearing the airwaves for other users. Of course, you'd still pay for those hefty bandwidth caps, charging >€1 per GB per month to rake in the cash.
A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.
Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.
You're thinking with a technical mind, but don't forget the business, marketing, legal and support.
Why have "unlimited" speed as baseline while you can charge some 10 times more for the privilege?
Also don't forget that if you sell "10gbps internet" you might have to legally guarantee a percentage of that. Or you have to explain how networking works to everyone who complains they never see 10gbps on Speedtest.net.
Also the more you offer, the more expensive your modem has to be.
In the EU subsidies for infrastructure upgrades are tied to a minimum, non guaranteed, downlink speed of 30 Mbps. For a family it is enough for most normal uses.
ISPs perhaps decided it was commercially more convenient, for the industry at large, to cross subsidize demanding applications by providing everyone with gigabit class connections and CPEs.
Around 8 years ago I saw an AT&T truck on our street, and the guys installing some fiber into our street conduits. I was ecstatic & started checking AT&T website periodically to see when the service will be enabled.
Guess what? It's still not enabled. AT&T only did it because there was a risk that Google Fiber will do it in our city. Unfortunately, IIUC, Google never could overcome local regulations and abandoned the project. So, AT&T didn't care to light up their fiber (that was already in the ground & ready to go!!!).
Comcast doesn't offer any cable in my location neither.
I've been seriously tempted to do it myself too, but doubt I'll ever have time for that - mostly to overcome the local bureaucracy to get all the permits...
oh, ~4 years ago I talked to Sonic guys at length (great company, btw!) - they were too far north from us, and their estimation was to make it viable for them, they'd need to have around 200 of my neighbors commit to switching to Sonic at once if they lay out the fiber in our location.
To get maximum effect, he now needs to write a book. Eventually, someone will come along and make the book into a movie. Soon after, that movie will be shown via Comcast!
Once all the work has been done and this guy is making money I suspect comcast or another ISP will buy his network and the rights to the movie, then jack up the prices considerably so these people will be paying even more to watch it on the ISP owned streaming service
In most US places, utility companies own the poles and it’s ridiculously expensive to lease space. Urban areas with competitive ISPs usually have government owned poles or leases for streetlight arbs that allow them to string fiber.
That's a weird analysis of US policy. Very few places in the US have privately owned poles. What most places have is private poles on public right of way. It's a worst of both worlds scenario. Where somehow public infrastructure is used to exclusively further private interests.
Yes the average salary of an internet installation technician is about $25 an hour or about a 1000 a week before taxes. Although, the people doing regular installs and the people who are in charge of planning and building out networks are different and often the latter are paid far more.
Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).
I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)
Perfecting Parliament, by Roger Congleton. It's a history of the global move towards parliamentary systems. Obviously not primarily an economics book, but he does touch on some econ themes- here Congleton quoted Adam Smith on American colonial wages
Mostly because most people have lots of options for employment and they typically don’t take the low options. In a place with nationalised healthcare you would still be paying for it through taxes paid by the labourer but I guess the system would be a bit more progressive than in the US so lower-skill labour would demand a smaller premium for healthcare. Though I think there’s probably more than just labour costs in the US. Eg maybe it is expensive to get the right permits to install fibre optic cables.
My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.
I assume you are on DOCSIS coax internet? The problem is upstream on DOCSIS is (very) constrained and if you hammer it causes huge problems for everyone on the segment (TCP ACKs start getting lost/slow, everyones ping rises massively and huge packetloss starts occurring).
Obviously no excuse to claim it is unlimited, but if the major US cable companies speeded up moving to true FTTH it would really save them a lot of trouble in the long run.
There’s no need for them to move to FTTH; 99.9% of homes don’t need more than 10-20Mbps upstream.
I was on 1000/40 for most of my history with them ($100+$50) now I have 2000/100 ($150+$50). I would be fine with 40Mbps upstream unlimited; the issue is not the throttling but the threats resulting from bait-and-switch.
The problem with cable internet is that the shared medium (coax segment) has relatively little upstream bandwidth, shared by 100's of users. FTTH has much more bandwidth and a smaller amount of homes sharing it. Typically there is a passive splitter / fiber distribution for 8 to 32 homes, at least an order of magnitude better than cable.
I switched to fiber a few years back. But at one point during covid, my cable modem upstream was getting less than a megabit (I was paying for 500/30.)
I’m in Vegas. It’s the first time I’ve actually had meaningful ISP competition and incredibly I can get fiber for 50 a month without caps. (Using quantum)
Russian public infrastructure is vastly different compared to the US though. It's probably much easier to run Internet to 10 apartment homes housing 1000 people than to 300 single family houses with the same amount of people.
I was living in Indonesia, where most of people lives in individual houses, internet installation is free or ~20$, but monthly is 20-50$ for fiber 100mbps. In house areas they have noodles of cables on the poles but it works
Yes small city in central (European) part. Mobile unlimited 4g is about 8$ but some operators has FUP 200gb monthly, with 4g modem connected to the router and special antenna in the roof will work well outside cities. About remote areas I don’t know
Abit inconsistent you’ll need to use VPN. (Don’t we have to use it in liberal countries too if open torrents)
It’s just some resources are blocked, it isn’t as bad as in China or Iran. Previously internet was same cheap but not so restricted
Telecomms told my area for decades that it was unprofitable to give internet access. We didn't even have DSL. Small local wireless networks filled the gap, but barely because this area is covered in tall trees and no significant high points. 2 years ago a fiber co-op started, covered nearly everything in a 60 mile radius with direct-to-home fiber, and are making bank and continuously expanding.
When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.
Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.
Some, the majority didn't care and of course we had the unfortunate few that were more than happy to help the company because they thought it would help earn them brownie points. We all got laid off the same in the end.
Indeed, our community had to fight that, IIRC, we had to vote to overturn those bans, but did eventually get it through. They also did a bunch of advertising saying "We have so many problems like traffic, shouldn't the money be spent there instead?", but the money that was used to build the network was NOT money the city could use for anything else, it was a bond specifically for FTTH initiative.
Buncha jerks.
I was in one of the earlier roll-outs and the change was amazing! It actually did happen during the pandemic, and at one point we had 4 people doing video calls from the house and Xfinity's fastest service couldn't keep up (because of outbound bandwidth limits), but the asymmetrical gigabit fiber wasn't breaking a sweat.
Now 3+ years later, CenturyLink (q.com) is finally starting to come through and lay down fiber. Those tools should have been laying it 20 years ago.
These are all statutes that impose obstacles to public bodies that want to roll out ISPs (few of the statutes are bans; more typical are rules like ad valorem taxation of ISP infrastructure). They're intended to offset cost advantages municipalities have in rolling out ISP infrastructure, because private ISPs have to pay taxes, buy rights of way, and actually win customers rather than rolling some of their costs off on the general levy. A colorable (though remote) concern would be that the most lucrative municipalities in a state might provision their own ISP service, thus cutting disincentivizing broadband providers from deploying anywhere in the state.
These rules don't keep people like the subject of this post from deploying community ISPs.
(I think the rules are very dumb but also the economics of small-scale municipal ISPs are not good at all; part of the reason they're dumb is that in reality a typical suburb has absolutely no hope of competing on price with Xfinity, Verizon, and AT&T.)
Public means the government. So that means it's harder, not impossible. That's good news because it means the situation isn't totally fucked, and it's probably legal to compete with the incumbents, and even have the unofficial blessing of the city (they like what you are doing so they grant all your digging permits).
Longmont, CO has had municipal fiber since 2013. In 2005 the state passed a cable industry-sponsored bill requiring all municipalities to pass a ballot measure before they could build municipal broadband over 256kbps. Longmont had such a measure in 2009 and it failed due to campaigning by private ISPs. It passed later, and in the years since the speed cap has been removed. But yeah, it was a fight against private industry to use infrastructure _built and owned by the city_ for its only possible use.
However, I really hope that more small ISP's get their shit together from a cybersecurity perspective. They are generally completely apathetic on the subject.
Impressive that he managed to sneak in there, usually the incumbents do everything they can to block anyone from competing, hence the absurd amount of lobbying they do against municipal ISPs, which Comcast and friends are so scared of that they've successfully enacted many state-level bans of the entire concept.
By the equally lazy and possibly bullshit method of "ask ChatGPT a follow-up question in your conversation" I learned that these laws are only about municipalities - private businesses are not restricted this way from deploying networks, even within a municipal region.
A guy in my city did something like this, except he started back in the dialup internet days and then transitioned to fiber over the years. I don't think it was specifically to take on comcast, more just to be in the ISP business in general. Family Video eventually invested in the company and quite a lot of people in the area have it now as it's basically the only fiber to home option in the area.
Would love to see more about the power and networking equipment and vendors involved for serving as an ISP. Obviously needs to be highly available and redundant at nearly all levels.
Ubiquiti has made huge leaps and bounds in the last year in terms of software and hardware. Realistically Ubiquiti Network could be used at the enterprise ISP level.
I'm about to switch from Spectrum to GVEC, a regional ISP and utility co-op started by farmers. It's about as good as Google Fiber but much more widely-available here, and doesn't give more money to a megacorp.
NYC has a collective that provides internet for free/donation based if you pay ~$160-290 for the equipment to get you connected. I forget what they provide in terms of speed, but its not insignificant.
I admire that the homepage for the ISP - https://washftth.com/ - is literally the default Debian Apache/httpd welcome page with new content inserted. The #CD214F color is the giveaway.
I had thought that Scotland (at least on the west coast) had a natural advantage from transatlantic cables landing there (meaning there is some good backbone infrastructure too) but I think I was just wrong and they mostly terminate around the Bristol Channel.
With extremely limited availability, the best you can get in most places is 1.8Gbps down and 120Mbps up isn’t it? I know OpenReach have recently announced a 1Gbps symmetric service but I’m not aware of any ISPs offering it yet and the wholesale costs are £1,200/year which is realistically going to translate to about £150+/month retail.
I’m with Zen and paying them, I think, £65/month for their 1.6Gbps package (they don’t offer 1.8 for some reason).
Starlink is definitely cannibalizing the boutique WISP market, which for the most part probably deserved to be cannibalized, although it's sad for cool grassroots efforts like the parallel thread about Ayva. Many WISPs make a lot of their money on enterprise service, for example, construction trailers, rather than residential service. This type of service is being absolutely destroyed by Starlink, which while expensive, is much easier to install and maintain than WISP solutions, and tends to be much more reliable.
In the case of the linked article project, however, I suspect there's limited impact from Starlink. The linked article was a subsidy project. The subsidy is to provide fiber in places that don't have landline Internet options, so it's still eligible in spite of Starlink. With subsidies, Starlink isn't hard to compete with due to its price (customers would be rather irrational not to switch to a $55/mo service that was comparable to their $80-$120/mo Starlink).
Maybe you haven't had a crappy boutique WISP? They're genuinely awful usually.
My house isn't served by any landline provider (frustratingly, it's also _almost_ in a city, so there's no hope for subsidy access like the linked article), so over the years I've had a mix of corporate WISP (Rise), boutique WISP, and LTE as well as Starlink. I also work with a fairly large geographically distributed deployment of Starlinks professionally. Overall I would rate Starlink as excellent in the past ~9months or so.
It's been a pretty rapid improvement - a year ago I'd say Starlink was fairly, to use your phrasing, "dogshit," but now I'd say it's better than all competing wireless solutions I've used for moderate throughput needs (<100mbit) when the whole package is considered.
Good, well engineered fixed point to point ISM wireless can certainly be much faster and a decent amount lower latency but is a pain to install correctly, and licensed microwave is obviously superior at the massive overhead of, well, licensed.
On the other hand, Starlink is so easy - set the service address, plug it in, and a few minutes later it's Just Working with a nice /56 worth of IPv6 addresses.
In my experience WISPs usually take weeks or more to install, have terrible neteng, struggle with IPv6 and even public IPv4, deliver frequent backhaul outages, and often end up with bad enough buffer bloat to somehow deliver inferior latency to Starlink. For semi-mobile solutions like construction trailers, command centers, or even sensor telemetry use cases where LTE isn't available and you don't need a whole LoRa setup, Starlink is a no brainer compared to a WISP. For residential service it's certainly a last resort, but a superior last resort to all but the very best WISPs.
One thing we have noticed is that the plan prioritization is VERY aggressive in oversubscribed regions, though. The Mobile and Lite plans get quite aggressively chopped off compared to the Residential/Enterprise/Priority plans.
If they have half a clue regarding marketing and networking, they are doing fine. Starlink doesnt offer Layer 2 or Managed WAN options (Possibly Vocus is bringing these projects out at some stage on their behalf)
In dense areas, starlink underperforms. In larger cities Fibre is beloved. Theres a wedge, where WISPS are king and still are king, where the density is just right.
That said, if you are running a really shitty wisp, and you dont have any business links or complex services. And half your customer base just bailed for starlink, you will likely fold. But honestly, WISP as an industry can do without the cowboys.
However much you think it costs to lay new fiber, add three zeroes. If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses. You then have to pay for the construction and any remediations the property owner demands. Typically you have to put the land back to exactly how you found it.
This is the entire reason that the US forced Bell/AT&T to allow any company to lease a connection to their network. Without that, it would have been flatly impossible for any new provider to compete. There is simply no way that anyone could have ever built out a network to compete with Bell.
You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
Your only recourse there is to additionally stand up DSL/DOCSIS as a 'last mile' connection between the customer and your fiber. At additional unbelievable expense.
> If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses.
This may be true in some areas, but it wasn't in mine. I didn't have to agree to anything; it was negotiated with the town, not me. I presume they used the existing utility/sewer easements.
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.
If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
You can get on the poles, if they're there and there's room, and you can find and follow the attachment rules and pay the attachment prices. Back when Google was going to run fiber to the home, they couldn't figure out how to manage the rules, which made their deployments very slow and eventually they gave up when AT&T (and others) deployed fiber to the communities Google announced before Google had managed to get plans finished.
They probably should have found a small telco or three to buy for expertise on pole bureaucracy.
Responding to your parent...
> You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
I would assume mandatory line sharing doesn't apply; the FCC walked back almost all of the 1996 Telecom Act line sharing; telcos and cablecos may well have designed their fiber to the home in ways to thwart what limited regulation was present anyway. If you're near 'commercial' fiber though, lots of that is available for lease.
Satellite is - once you've got the infra up in the air - very straightforward, with the downside that your satellite ISP is likely owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line). It's hard to do that with regulated fiber backhaul, but not impossible.
I've seen a few wireless ISPs mentioned here before, which can be a nice hub/spoke model - run fast fiber to a community, but distribute via wireless (note, not WiFi) to homes and businesses within range.
I'd definitely love to see more community-run ISPs in the World, it's how the Internet should work, really.
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia. This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
Not true. From the very second paragraph in bold on top from your own link:
> Update: on 9 September 2023, Walter Isaacson said his biography’s claim about Starlink and Crimea was based on “mistaken” information [see footnote]
The footnote:
> This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
Every time someone complains about their ISP I encourage them to think about starting their own. If you're a nerd it doesn't seem impossible at all - in fact it's happened many many times before. Obviously, a lot of people need stable jobs and the like, but if even a small percentage of people end up taking some steps, that's great.
Starlink is amazing, but not as amazing as an actual fiber running to your house. If you can get actual fiber then you should. The primary reason is that it has very high headroom for future expansion. You might be getting 1Gbps today, but any individual fiber can actually carry 100Tbps (or 100,000 gigabits per second) using commercial equipment. The speed record is higher still, so there is plenty of scope for further upgrades in the future.
Do keep in mind, however, that residential service is usually provided by GPON or XGPON. Instead of a single fiber running from every single customer to the ISP, optical splitters are used so that up to 128 customers can share a single fiber. The fiber is run at 50Gbps or 100Gbps or whatever, and the individual customers share that using TDMA. That does somewhat limit the available headroom. Speaking just for myself, I would be entirely satisfied by a 1Tbps slice of that 100Tbps of available bandwidth.
> Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees.
For one, Starlink won't get anywhere close to 1gbps
The article documents delivery, and a little searching told me that Washtenaw Fiber Properties is still in business at https://washftth.com/ and serving customers.
Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network
Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular.
(Huge kudos for this project in general)
Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...
That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.
This page was 9 seconds of white screen before the entire thing loaded at once. I'm on Starlink. Hopefully you get a chance to correct this in the future, as I'm really supportive of projects like yours, but if the page was linked from a top-5 article or something I would have hit the back button already.
Totally - we're not advertising yet and usually only dealing with very local traffic at the moment, didn't expect to get tens of thousands of hits from linking to it from a hackernews comment!
The backend is an azure appservice running on a single low-spec worker at the moment, wasn't planning on enabling scaling before doing a hard-launch but here we are.
I am sorry, I always forget about the 'HN effect'!
First Contentful Paint at 12.0 seconds here, and I'm on fiber.
On my phone on Comcast cable it was like 3 seconds for me.
It's a great marketing strategy. People without broadband access will truly feel it when they visit.
Also was a few seconds of white screen for me. And I'm on fiber
Yes the white page with nothing else mad me think it was broken.
It's currently running on a single azure appworker, you might've hit it during a service autoheal/reset. There's a fair bit of overhead for every connection since it's designed for our subscribers to use and get realtime stats on their connection, was not expecting to get tens of thousands of hits by linking to it in a hacker news comment.
21 seconds from click to video in this old neighborhood (50 Mbps) in Europe.
(not OP)
This nerdsniped me.
10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools.
However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP.
I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing
(also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)
Frontend is full blazor w/hybrid WASM, almost zero JS, all C#. Browser DOM is controlled by the app service in realtime, I plan on using this as a basis for our subscribers to be able to do live traffic & link stats monitoring, among other things.
Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb
In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those.
I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.
You are doing God's work. Thank you. I wish more people cared about wasteful bandwidth usage.
Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr
If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D
"Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189
It's not really the size that matters in this case, because the video is loaded after the page is completed, and in theory, ought not be slowing down the page if at all (my cursory examining of the network tab gives me a sort of confirmation).
However, what is indeed slow is the initial load, and the lack of CDN for their static assets (css etc). When the HN effect started eating their resources, these static assets are what hurt their load time the most.
Xfinity's website is like that, it barely loads even using their service. I've had it time out several times, and had to start over, just trying to help my mom pay her bill.
Page doesn’t even load for me.
Yeah me neither from Australia. Hug of death?
Probably hit it while the appservice was healing, amazed at the amount of traffic it got from being just a comment on hackernews.
I wonder if there's value in a method by which you slow down traffic by region, while keeping/saving resources alive for faster traffic in a different region (that you actually care about). Surge traffic such as HN frontpage will cause massive amounts of traffic to come in from all over the world, but because this service is only relevant to locals, it would suck to have hurt their speed/experience.
I can scale up our worker count as needed, but we keep it at a minimum since our Azure bills are already insane. Fun tidbit, there's a little counter on the bottom right which tracks live app circuits on the site, we were cracking thousands yesterday, normally it's ~5-10 at most. Did NOT anticipate having this kind of attention from a comment, and we were out climbing in Boulder Canyon when the bulk of the traffic hit the site.
Why don't you host it yourself if the kids is so small on a normal day?
I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.
Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
> I get random cookies & care packages from people
I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.
Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.
I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.
I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.
We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)
Couldn’t have been anything older than a 386 as that was minimum spec even for Linux 1.0.
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.
> In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."
Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.
What kind of transport are you using to hit 2.5Gbps without fibre at that distance?
802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.
Sounds very optimistic to consistently deliver 2.5Gbps to that size of cell, your backhaul has to be huge.
It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.
How does that perform in heavy rain or snow? I've always been told that when dealing with mmWave, attenuation gets pretty bad when dealing with adverse climate conditions, and Boulder is surely no stranger to snow.
Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.
The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.
I'll understand if you don't want to answer this or legally can't answer it. What does a 100gbps circuit cost a month? How about the 10gbps uplinks also?
We can't, we're under NDAs for all of that stuff :(
Roughly single-digit cents per megabit
> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.
Water and sewer is probably well and a septic tank/leach field. The electrical service is probably at least that much though.
If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?
If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).
My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.
>local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it
Nationwide telecomms did that with funds for fiber to the premises as well. I have no idea why these telecomms can take the money and just refuse to provide the services.
Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?
Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there.
That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.
Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen.
1: http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBro...
2: A more recent example from 2024: https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...
I’m sure Starlink will consume the oxygen. Good news is they can deliver quickly. Bad news is that strategically it’s a fragile and higher risk offering for critical infrastructure.
It’s really essential to fund or make it feasible for companies to fund broadband. Universal broadband should be a priority.
Rural programs are really successful, until the money runs out. Cities get screwed though — I served on a commission with my city on this topic and the only feasible competition at scale, Verizon, refused to engage unless the city allowed them to pick individual blocks to deploy, which means no servitude for underrepresented people.
Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.
My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.
This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.
Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex.
p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you
Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
Please don’t use C !
“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies”
God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.
I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.
I am in France so not exactly in your coverage but I wanted to not that the comparison card (and the coverage one) do not work correctly.
The first information is fine (say, speed) but when I switch to latency the graph does not change (and BTW it's not readable on mobile)
Same for the coverage
This is what I love in HN.
Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda.
Great site.
Any plans to expand into JeffCo?
Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha
Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost.
It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.
>The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.
What metric is “insanity” and why do you find that insane?
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
I legit wish I had known about you a few years ago when writing my thesis. It was about community run broadband internet. I was trying to identify repeatable models for communities who wanted to run their own ISPs to use. This would have been so helpful!
Side note, truly inspirational an something I would love to do in my little village in Ohio.
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking more about your thesis? I am interested in rural internet as well for Native American reservations and both opie's and your comments are inspiring and something I definitely want to read.
I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.
I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).
I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.
Year 1: $52/mo Year 2: $74/mo Year 3: $98/mo
I have made no changes to my account.
This is why we need choices for ISP's.
Drop flyers on campus/doorsteps when students move in, good way to get 1 year contracts if those are worth it for you (might not be). Comcast just walks door to door and hands kids routers on the spot.
We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
That's a beautiful thing.
https://startyourownisp.com/
Useful threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
how can I do this for my city?
Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
Do you operate it as a nonprofit? Seems like you could be at least seeing some tax benefits probably
This is really cool!
Does long-range ubiquiti just work because you’re in the mountains?
I’m down in much-flatter Columbia South Carolina. Would a similar setup even be physically feasible?
We had a company burying fiber, but their installers almost blew up a gas line during 5 o’clock traffic and it really pissed city council off.
This page is so large it causes the browser on my phone to crash the tab.
Hell yeah dude.
Sonic started as a little local ISP in Santa Rosa, CA.[1] Now it's huge in Northern California.
I have 1GB Sonic bidirectional fiber with unlimited data and could get 10GB if I wanted. The head of Sonic points out that long-haul prices have decreased over the years, and there's no real need for usage limits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_(ISP)
Self-quoting[0]:
> Sonic has the best customer service of any company ever encountered, and it's not even close. The few times I've had to contact them for assistance, I've been very quickly connected with someone clearly _very_ technical who was able to grok my problem immediately and give clear, cogent, respectful debugging advice and perspective. I do not exaggerate when I say I would gladly pay double their current rate just for the peace of mind of knowing that I can depend on them if I ever need their support again. Not that I often do, because their baseline connectivity/speed is also great.
>
> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42252183
This has been my experience with our local ISP in Minneapolis as well. Granted, I’ve only ever reached out to them maybe 3 times over 6 years, but each time they’ve been exceptional. No more than two phone rings before a person in our metro area answered, they got me to right person who provided actual good believable information and the situation was fixed. The first time I ever reached out to them, by email, I wasn’t even a customer— I was calling to ask when they would resurface a sidewalk that they had torn up for an install in my neighborhood. The director of operations emailed me back, not with an exact date but with a pretty detailed reason for the delay that was clearly written just for this situation, not a form letter, and then he followed up when the work was scheduled.
One day we might even get IPv6! Everything else is true though, they’re super great.
> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.
Properly good, human and effective customer service is so rare these days that I tend to trust hyperbolic reviews like these more than others, believing that the person honestly feels that way, having been there myself.
I just wish they more reliably covered SF. Outside of the Richmond and Sunset districts coverage is spotty at best
I have their 10G service. I love the company and the people. I remember when I first called them to sign up. At the end of the call with the sales guy I told him that 30 minute conversation was one of the most interesting and fun conversations I had ever had with someone I had just met. It was surreal.
The installer was super nice and great at their job.
Their service is so good I have not had an excuse to talk with anyone else.
Many of my neighbors have switched from Comcast, who I was with for more than 10 years, and hated every second of it. Only AT&T is worse than Comcast, but they are both bottom dwellers.
> The head of Sonic points out that long-haul prices have decreased over the years, and there's no real need for usage limits.
Well, aside from increasing your margins...
I have missed Sonic every day since moving from Oakland to SF
I have their 10GB line and I could NOT be happier. Only company where I reply to their “please rate us emails"
I had Sonic for a year I spent in San Francisco, it was absolutely amazing and wish that they were everywhere. I can understand that dense areas like SF make it a lot easier to expand, I just wish that density like that wasn't banned on 99% of city land.
This ISP was actually part of a detailed study in my college class on networking. The founder created a singular example of an "open-source ISP" [1], and I am pretty sure you can find his guidance online somewhere if you were inclined to build your own.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
I read about “future proofing” and “expansion” possibilities of one’s fiber connection. And related user equipment.
My story is in the opposite direction.
We and everyone else in the neighborhood had symmetrical 1 Gbps installed about 15 years ago. We all paid the ISP for the top tier of full capacity.
During Covid decided to take inventory of our actual bandwidth needs.
Anything that can be deferred doesn’t count. Gone from instant bandwidth requirements are all cloud backups, OTA OS upgrades and apps updates. They need to complete overnight. Overlapping is not a requirement.
Videos are automatically played at 480p or less on iPhones, 720p or less on iPads and 1080p or less on HDTV. We purposely didn’t buy 4K TV because at our viewing distance has no benefits whatsoever. Aggregate peak bandwidth required here is 25 Mbps at a stretch. That is also enough for my wife to work from home.
We don’t deal with large datasets or raw videos over the internet.
So we found ourselves with one cable connected TV and the usual assortment of mobile devices connected to one WiFi 4 1x1 hotspot. At 70 Mbps we never noticed any loss of quality in our digital lifestyle.
After about ten years we replaced the hotspot with one capable of WiFi 5. An overkill but needed the extra port.
Eventually convinced the ISP to lower our subscription to the lowest available tier of 200 Mbps. We don’t notice any difference. We could afford the extra bandwidth. But don’t see the benefits of it.
Gigabit internet, or even >100mbps internet, is burst capacity. Very few people hit gigabit speeds continuously, and those that do often hit either bandwidth caps or fair use policy limitations. It's also why ISPs can use a 10gbps fiber backbone to serve gigabit to 50-100 homes, because the probability of all of those homes capping out their bandwidth at the same time is tiny.
That's also why a lot of supposedly fast ISPs absolutely crumbled when COVID hit. A lot of people started doing video calls in the morning/afternoons, which suddenly sent latency-sensitive, bidirectional, high-bandwidth data to every corner of the network. Upload speeds collapsed, gigabit networks were struggling to hit a couple hundred mbps, and DSL providers downgraded their customers to 2005 in terms of attainable network speeds.
For that reason, I think ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default. Their customer base is not going to make use of that capacity anyway. Only when downloading a new game, or doing a backup, or uploading a video file somewhere, does that bandwidth become a necessity. If you remove the cap on the bandwidth side, all of that capacity will remain available for a longer period of time for all of the other people in the neighbourhood.
Some cellular providers used the same reasoning for their plans here a few years back: there were no 4G speed caps, just upload/download as fast as you can, because if you're done doing your file transfer quicker, you're clearing the airwaves for other users. Of course, you'd still pay for those hefty bandwidth caps, charging >€1 per GB per month to rake in the cash.
Indeed. Guaranteed capacity for FTTH in the EU is often 0.1% or so of peak. Consistent with your answer.
I am not sure maximizing throughput to gigabit and beyond is materials efficient though. Fig 33 shows energy efficiency is squarely on the FTTH side anyway: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Prysmian-s...
A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.
Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.
> ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default
You're thinking with a technical mind, but don't forget the business, marketing, legal and support.
Why have "unlimited" speed as baseline while you can charge some 10 times more for the privilege?
Also don't forget that if you sell "10gbps internet" you might have to legally guarantee a percentage of that. Or you have to explain how networking works to everyone who complains they never see 10gbps on Speedtest.net.
Also the more you offer, the more expensive your modem has to be.
I did some thinking on this as well and came to the conclusion that 50mbps is enough for a single person.
extra bandwidth if good to have just in case and will save time on large downloads.
In the EU subsidies for infrastructure upgrades are tied to a minimum, non guaranteed, downlink speed of 30 Mbps. For a family it is enough for most normal uses.
ISPs perhaps decided it was commercially more convenient, for the industry at large, to cross subsidize demanding applications by providing everyone with gigabit class connections and CPEs.
Around 8 years ago I saw an AT&T truck on our street, and the guys installing some fiber into our street conduits. I was ecstatic & started checking AT&T website periodically to see when the service will be enabled.
Guess what? It's still not enabled. AT&T only did it because there was a risk that Google Fiber will do it in our city. Unfortunately, IIUC, Google never could overcome local regulations and abandoned the project. So, AT&T didn't care to light up their fiber (that was already in the ground & ready to go!!!).
Comcast doesn't offer any cable in my location neither.
I've been seriously tempted to do it myself too, but doubt I'll ever have time for that - mostly to overcome the local bureaucracy to get all the permits...
Huge respect to Jared!
oh, ~4 years ago I talked to Sonic guys at length (great company, btw!) - they were too far north from us, and their estimation was to make it viable for them, they'd need to have around 200 of my neighbors commit to switching to Sonic at once if they lay out the fiber in our location.
Having switched from Comcast it is well worth it.
To get maximum effect, he now needs to write a book. Eventually, someone will come along and make the book into a movie. Soon after, that movie will be shown via Comcast!
Once all the work has been done and this guy is making money I suspect comcast or another ISP will buy his network and the rights to the movie, then jack up the prices considerably so these people will be paying even more to watch it on the ISP owned streaming service
He gave a presentation at NLNOG 2020, "Getting Fiber To My Town":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
* Slides: https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf
* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910
* He posted some replies in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jaredmauch
Involves trenchers. Also, at NANOG, "Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to my Neighbors":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo
This article is dated 2022. Can you append (2022) to the title?
Agreed, and this was discussed at the time here (it was a front page submission 3 years ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32411493 - Aug 2022 (427 comments)
It would be funny if there were actual macros in HN and we could have our own replacements like
%PASTLINKS=32411493%
And someone forgot to turn them off for all users and they were discovered ... HACKED! haha
Added. Thanks!
In Russia we get 500-1000mbps (for real) for about 5-10$ monthly, every home has few ISP options with free installation
Labor costs are lower. The US has the highest cost of labor in the world for many jobs that would be relatively inexpensive elsewhere.
Russia probably has state owned poles.
In most US places, utility companies own the poles and it’s ridiculously expensive to lease space. Urban areas with competitive ISPs usually have government owned poles or leases for streetlight arbs that allow them to string fiber.
That's a weird analysis of US policy. Very few places in the US have privately owned poles. What most places have is private poles on public right of way. It's a worst of both worlds scenario. Where somehow public infrastructure is used to exclusively further private interests.
Sounds like they own the poles bro.
Average salary nowadays is 800-1000$/mnt (after 30-40% taxes), I would expect internet price in US to be proportional to their labor costs
Yes the average salary of an internet installation technician is about $25 an hour or about a 1000 a week before taxes. Although, the people doing regular installs and the people who are in charge of planning and building out networks are different and often the latter are paid far more.
Why is labour so expensive in the US? Is it because of healthcare costs being passed to employers?
Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).
I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)
what book?
Perfecting Parliament, by Roger Congleton. It's a history of the global move towards parliamentary systems. Obviously not primarily an economics book, but he does touch on some econ themes- here Congleton quoted Adam Smith on American colonial wages
Mostly because most people have lots of options for employment and they typically don’t take the low options. In a place with nationalised healthcare you would still be paying for it through taxes paid by the labourer but I guess the system would be a bit more progressive than in the US so lower-skill labour would demand a smaller premium for healthcare. Though I think there’s probably more than just labour costs in the US. Eg maybe it is expensive to get the right permits to install fibre optic cables.
My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.
Internet pricing is a scam in the USA.
I assume you are on DOCSIS coax internet? The problem is upstream on DOCSIS is (very) constrained and if you hammer it causes huge problems for everyone on the segment (TCP ACKs start getting lost/slow, everyones ping rises massively and huge packetloss starts occurring).
Obviously no excuse to claim it is unlimited, but if the major US cable companies speeded up moving to true FTTH it would really save them a lot of trouble in the long run.
There’s no need for them to move to FTTH; 99.9% of homes don’t need more than 10-20Mbps upstream.
I was on 1000/40 for most of my history with them ($100+$50) now I have 2000/100 ($150+$50). I would be fine with 40Mbps upstream unlimited; the issue is not the throttling but the threats resulting from bait-and-switch.
The problem with cable internet is that the shared medium (coax segment) has relatively little upstream bandwidth, shared by 100's of users. FTTH has much more bandwidth and a smaller amount of homes sharing it. Typically there is a passive splitter / fiber distribution for 8 to 32 homes, at least an order of magnitude better than cable.
I switched to fiber a few years back. But at one point during covid, my cable modem upstream was getting less than a megabit (I was paying for 500/30.)
I’m in Vegas. It’s the first time I’ve actually had meaningful ISP competition and incredibly I can get fiber for 50 a month without caps. (Using quantum)
Russian public infrastructure is vastly different compared to the US though. It's probably much easier to run Internet to 10 apartment homes housing 1000 people than to 300 single family houses with the same amount of people.
I was living in Indonesia, where most of people lives in individual houses, internet installation is free or ~20$, but monthly is 20-50$ for fiber 100mbps. In house areas they have noodles of cables on the poles but it works
Assuming $ still denotes US currency, that looks fairly expensive relative the average salary.
I remember paying about 10$ for a proper gigabit in Russia. Probably a perk of living right next to an exchange point.
It is expensive.
I'm paying £40 a month for symmetric gigabit to my home, which is a house, in a suburb full of other houses, with no apartment blocks in sight.
I'm guessing in cities.
Yes small city in central (European) part. Mobile unlimited 4g is about 8$ but some operators has FUP 200gb monthly, with 4g modem connected to the router and special antenna in the roof will work well outside cities. About remote areas I don’t know
In Russia you get pseudo-internet without Youtube, Instagram, X, Discord, The Internet Archive, many news sites.
Abit inconsistent you’ll need to use VPN. (Don’t we have to use it in liberal countries too if open torrents) It’s just some resources are blocked, it isn’t as bad as in China or Iran. Previously internet was same cheap but not so restricted
That's what happens when you invade a country to steal resources and equipment.
I believe that in Russia you wrestle bears and that the only liquid anyone drinks is vodka, but this I simply cannot believe :)
How many ISP options do you have at your location?
Typically the US only has one. Two if you are exceedingly lucky.
Telecomms told my area for decades that it was unprofitable to give internet access. We didn't even have DSL. Small local wireless networks filled the gap, but barely because this area is covered in tall trees and no significant high points. 2 years ago a fiber co-op started, covered nearly everything in a 60 mile radius with direct-to-home fiber, and are making bank and continuously expanding.
I hope more community ISPs happen <3
Comcast and others have been using the corruption of our representatives to push for bans of community ISPs.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-...
When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.
Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.
Think you co-workers saw it for what it was?
Some, the majority didn't care and of course we had the unfortunate few that were more than happy to help the company because they thought it would help earn them brownie points. We all got laid off the same in the end.
I like the ending. Classic capitalism story.
Indeed, our community had to fight that, IIRC, we had to vote to overturn those bans, but did eventually get it through. They also did a bunch of advertising saying "We have so many problems like traffic, shouldn't the money be spent there instead?", but the money that was used to build the network was NOT money the city could use for anything else, it was a bond specifically for FTTH initiative.
Buncha jerks.
I was in one of the earlier roll-outs and the change was amazing! It actually did happen during the pandemic, and at one point we had 4 people doing video calls from the house and Xfinity's fastest service couldn't keep up (because of outbound bandwidth limits), but the asymmetrical gigabit fiber wasn't breaking a sweat.
Now 3+ years later, CenturyLink (q.com) is finally starting to come through and lay down fiber. Those tools should have been laying it 20 years ago.
These are all statutes that impose obstacles to public bodies that want to roll out ISPs (few of the statutes are bans; more typical are rules like ad valorem taxation of ISP infrastructure). They're intended to offset cost advantages municipalities have in rolling out ISP infrastructure, because private ISPs have to pay taxes, buy rights of way, and actually win customers rather than rolling some of their costs off on the general levy. A colorable (though remote) concern would be that the most lucrative municipalities in a state might provision their own ISP service, thus cutting disincentivizing broadband providers from deploying anywhere in the state.
These rules don't keep people like the subject of this post from deploying community ISPs.
(I think the rules are very dumb but also the economics of small-scale municipal ISPs are not good at all; part of the reason they're dumb is that in reality a typical suburb has absolutely no hope of competing on price with Xfinity, Verizon, and AT&T.)
Community owned or government owned?
Government owned (more precisely, owned by any public body).
Public means the government. So that means it's harder, not impossible. That's good news because it means the situation isn't totally fucked, and it's probably legal to compete with the incumbents, and even have the unofficial blessing of the city (they like what you are doing so they grant all your digging permits).
It's illegal in most places, because the large incumbents are using a corrupt government to protect their revenue streams.
See also: banking, healthcare
Longmont, CO has had municipal fiber since 2013. In 2005 the state passed a cable industry-sponsored bill requiring all municipalities to pass a ballot measure before they could build municipal broadband over 256kbps. Longmont had such a measure in 2009 and it failed due to campaigning by private ISPs. It passed later, and in the years since the speed cap has been removed. But yeah, it was a fight against private industry to use infrastructure _built and owned by the city_ for its only possible use.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/24/municipal-internet-sb-152...
Me too. I love small ISPs.
However, I really hope that more small ISP's get their shit together from a cybersecurity perspective. They are generally completely apathetic on the subject.
Impressive that he managed to sneak in there, usually the incumbents do everything they can to block anyone from competing, hence the absurd amount of lobbying they do against municipal ISPs, which Comcast and friends are so scared of that they've successfully enacted many state-level bans of the entire concept.
(Quick but AI-sourced summary: https://chatgpt.com/share/68004134-f9b0-8008-9b77-f43d1750c5... )
By the equally lazy and possibly bullshit method of "ask ChatGPT a follow-up question in your conversation" I learned that these laws are only about municipalities - private businesses are not restricted this way from deploying networks, even within a municipal region.
I agree, though you can bet the Comcasts will just as sneakily and shadily legally maneuver to block private competitors too.
A guy in my city did something like this, except he started back in the dialup internet days and then transitioned to fiber over the years. I don't think it was specifically to take on comcast, more just to be in the ISP business in general. Family Video eventually invested in the company and quite a lot of people in the area have it now as it's basically the only fiber to home option in the area.
Would love to see more about the power and networking equipment and vendors involved for serving as an ISP. Obviously needs to be highly available and redundant at nearly all levels.
Ubiquiti has made huge leaps and bounds in the last year in terms of software and hardware. Realistically Ubiquiti Network could be used at the enterprise ISP level.
- 48 port 25G SFP28 switch with hot-swap power (https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/e...)
- Gateway / router with 25G SFP28 WAN and LAN with hot-swap power (https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/cloud-gateways-enterpris...)
I'm about to switch from Spectrum to GVEC, a regional ISP and utility co-op started by farmers. It's about as good as Google Fiber but much more widely-available here, and doesn't give more money to a megacorp.
NYC has a collective that provides internet for free/donation based if you pay ~$160-290 for the equipment to get you connected. I forget what they provide in terms of speed, but its not insignificant.
https://map.nycmesh.net/
I admire that the homepage for the ISP - https://washftth.com/ - is literally the default Debian Apache/httpd welcome page with new content inserted. The #CD214F color is the giveaway.
Eww, I am not buying internet from no company that doesn't have a flashy hero banner, 20mb of JavaScript libraries and a Cloudflare captcha.
Websites like these tend to win subscribers. My ISP was the same when I subscribed.
> 1Gbps [symmetrical] with unlimited data for $79 a month.
This costs $500 in Australia in the inner city.
I pay $35/mo for 10 Gbps in Japan https://www.speedtest.net/result/d/707868117.png
In Canada, Rogers/Bell would have you assassinated for even suggesting speeds like that are possible in 2025.
You can’t get symmetrical 1Gbps residential connections, but I imagine the EE plans cost more than $500/m.
I’m on Leaptel 1000/400 for $166/m and it’s fantastic. Fingers crossed they offer the nbn multi gig speeds later this year.
It's crazy to me how different it is across the Tasman - in NZ you can get 2 or 4 Gbps symmetrical for $150-180/m NZD in major cities.
> This costs $500 in Australia in the inner city.
I'd pay that. I am stuck with 2mb ADSL living in the centre of a major city in Scotland.
I had thought that Scotland (at least on the west coast) had a natural advantage from transatlantic cables landing there (meaning there is some good backbone infrastructure too) but I think I was just wrong and they mostly terminate around the Bristol Channel.
Really? I'm on 74/18 down/up in Dundee. https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623286611
(tbf when I was more central dundee it was closer to 20/10).
Sounds like a business line or something specialist. What's the average civilian internet like?
Australia had a uniquely fucked up fiber rollout (the National Broadband Network or NBN). I don't know if it's still fucked.
Intertesting. I get 1Gbps symmetric from AT&T for $90/mo (was $70/mo two years ago when this article was written).
I'm in the Silicon Valley and have multiple ISP options (although AT&T is the only 1000/1000 option).
I guess our prices stay low because if they went too high it would motivate their competitors to move in.
Aussie Broadband is $150/month for 1Gbps/Down 50Mbs/Up, unless you really need the symmetric that is not representative.
In Norway this costs $130 a month after you've added the option of having a fixed IPv4 address.
UK £37 a month, £5 extra for a static IPv4 address.
With extremely limited availability, the best you can get in most places is 1.8Gbps down and 120Mbps up isn’t it? I know OpenReach have recently announced a 1Gbps symmetric service but I’m not aware of any ISPs offering it yet and the wholesale costs are £1,200/year which is realistically going to translate to about £150+/month retail.
I’m with Zen and paying them, I think, £65/month for their 1.6Gbps package (they don’t offer 1.8 for some reason).
There are alt-net fibre providers with a symmetric service.
I am only paying for 500Mbps but could get 2Gbps if I wanted.
I really wonder how the availability of Starlink affects these sorts of projects.
Starlink is definitely cannibalizing the boutique WISP market, which for the most part probably deserved to be cannibalized, although it's sad for cool grassroots efforts like the parallel thread about Ayva. Many WISPs make a lot of their money on enterprise service, for example, construction trailers, rather than residential service. This type of service is being absolutely destroyed by Starlink, which while expensive, is much easier to install and maintain than WISP solutions, and tends to be much more reliable.
In the case of the linked article project, however, I suspect there's limited impact from Starlink. The linked article was a subsidy project. The subsidy is to provide fiber in places that don't have landline Internet options, so it's still eligible in spite of Starlink. With subsidies, Starlink isn't hard to compete with due to its price (customers would be rather irrational not to switch to a $55/mo service that was comparable to their $80-$120/mo Starlink).
> and tends to be much more reliable.
maybe you don't have starlink?
the variance in latency is dogshit, especially in the evening when everyone in the area hops on netflix :) and i don't even play online games.
> maybe you don't have starlink?
Maybe you haven't had a crappy boutique WISP? They're genuinely awful usually.
My house isn't served by any landline provider (frustratingly, it's also _almost_ in a city, so there's no hope for subsidy access like the linked article), so over the years I've had a mix of corporate WISP (Rise), boutique WISP, and LTE as well as Starlink. I also work with a fairly large geographically distributed deployment of Starlinks professionally. Overall I would rate Starlink as excellent in the past ~9months or so.
It's been a pretty rapid improvement - a year ago I'd say Starlink was fairly, to use your phrasing, "dogshit," but now I'd say it's better than all competing wireless solutions I've used for moderate throughput needs (<100mbit) when the whole package is considered.
Good, well engineered fixed point to point ISM wireless can certainly be much faster and a decent amount lower latency but is a pain to install correctly, and licensed microwave is obviously superior at the massive overhead of, well, licensed.
On the other hand, Starlink is so easy - set the service address, plug it in, and a few minutes later it's Just Working with a nice /56 worth of IPv6 addresses.
In my experience WISPs usually take weeks or more to install, have terrible neteng, struggle with IPv6 and even public IPv4, deliver frequent backhaul outages, and often end up with bad enough buffer bloat to somehow deliver inferior latency to Starlink. For semi-mobile solutions like construction trailers, command centers, or even sensor telemetry use cases where LTE isn't available and you don't need a whole LoRa setup, Starlink is a no brainer compared to a WISP. For residential service it's certainly a last resort, but a superior last resort to all but the very best WISPs.
One thing we have noticed is that the plan prioritization is VERY aggressive in oversubscribed regions, though. The Mobile and Lite plans get quite aggressively chopped off compared to the Residential/Enterprise/Priority plans.
I run a small WISP - most of our new subscribers are coming from Starlink, but we are also cheaper and provide gigabit-class service.
Depends.
If they have half a clue regarding marketing and networking, they are doing fine. Starlink doesnt offer Layer 2 or Managed WAN options (Possibly Vocus is bringing these projects out at some stage on their behalf)
In dense areas, starlink underperforms. In larger cities Fibre is beloved. Theres a wedge, where WISPS are king and still are king, where the density is just right.
That said, if you are running a really shitty wisp, and you dont have any business links or complex services. And half your customer base just bailed for starlink, you will likely fold. But honestly, WISP as an industry can do without the cowboys.
This. How is local fiber not the easiest solution to the problem though?
However much you think it costs to lay new fiber, add three zeroes. If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses. You then have to pay for the construction and any remediations the property owner demands. Typically you have to put the land back to exactly how you found it.
This is the entire reason that the US forced Bell/AT&T to allow any company to lease a connection to their network. Without that, it would have been flatly impossible for any new provider to compete. There is simply no way that anyone could have ever built out a network to compete with Bell.
You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
Your only recourse there is to additionally stand up DSL/DOCSIS as a 'last mile' connection between the customer and your fiber. At additional unbelievable expense.
> If you lay a new line, you have to individually negotiate for easment rights with the owner of every single property your line crosses.
This may be true in some areas, but it wasn't in mine. I didn't have to agree to anything; it was negotiated with the town, not me. I presume they used the existing utility/sewer easements.
If I'm in a city neighborhood, could I just run fiber on the telephone poles just like Comcast does cable? I could probably run point-to-point connections from my garage to 16 single family homes and 2 multi-unit buildings with 3000' (extremely generous) of fiber.
If it was $50/mo, and 20 customers, that's only $1k/mo, which I'm not sure would cover a fiber backhaul...
You can get on the poles, if they're there and there's room, and you can find and follow the attachment rules and pay the attachment prices. Back when Google was going to run fiber to the home, they couldn't figure out how to manage the rules, which made their deployments very slow and eventually they gave up when AT&T (and others) deployed fiber to the communities Google announced before Google had managed to get plans finished.
They probably should have found a small telco or three to buy for expertise on pole bureaucracy.
Responding to your parent...
> You can probably lease a connection to the fiber network in the same way (I haven't checked, but I assume common carrier applies), but if there's no fiber to the addresses you want to service you're SOL unless you want to front tens of thousands of dollars per customer. No ROI on that for many, many years.
I would assume mandatory line sharing doesn't apply; the FCC walked back almost all of the 1996 Telecom Act line sharing; telcos and cablecos may well have designed their fiber to the home in ways to thwart what limited regulation was present anyway. If you're near 'commercial' fiber though, lots of that is available for lease.
Easements and access.
-The people that install fiber cost $100/hr+
-Trenching and directional boring equipment is expensive. Setting poles to run overhead fiber on is expensive.
-Restoration of green space, asphalt, and concrete are all expensive
-Easements are time consuming to negotiate if there isn’t a utility easement available to use
Laying fiber is expensive and time consuming.
Satellite is - once you've got the infra up in the air - very straightforward, with the downside that your satellite ISP is likely owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line). It's hard to do that with regulated fiber backhaul, but not impossible.
I've seen a few wireless ISPs mentioned here before, which can be a nice hub/spoke model - run fast fiber to a community, but distribute via wireless (note, not WiFi) to homes and businesses within range.
I'd definitely love to see more community-run ISPs in the World, it's how the Internet should work, really.
And even if you aren't disconnected, there are valid concerns about privacy and censorship.
> owned/operated by an unregulated billionaire nutcase that will turn off your access if he doesn't like you any more (c.f. Ukraine front line)
Is this actually true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
> In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia. This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
Sad to see your comment downvoted for inconvenient facts correcting a very prevalent urban legend.
This is the level of political bias that exists where facts have to be suppressed to fuel the narrative and the agenda.
Original (non-primary) source cited at the end of that paragraph:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
[EDIT: Deleted quoted text from above, because I missed (!!!) the retraction from the cited primary author ]
Not true. From the very second paragraph in bold on top from your own link:
> Update: on 9 September 2023, Walter Isaacson said his biography’s claim about Starlink and Crimea was based on “mistaken” information [see footnote]
The footnote:
> This article was amended on 14 September 2023 to add an update to the subheading. As the Guardian reported on 12 September 2023, following the publication of this article, Walter Isaacson retracted the claim in his biography of Elon Musk that the SpaceX CEO had secretly told engineers to switch off Starlink coverage of the Crimean coast.
Absolutely. Apologies for missing that. I read the Guardian daily, and that makes it easy to miss the way they do apologies/retractions.
Every time someone complains about their ISP I encourage them to think about starting their own. If you're a nerd it doesn't seem impossible at all - in fact it's happened many many times before. Obviously, a lot of people need stable jobs and the like, but if even a small percentage of people end up taking some steps, that's great.
The ultimate sysadmin flex.
Impressed that he got cell towers to backhaul over it. Wouldn’t have expected that.
Says a lot about how shit the competition is if they’d rather take a chance on a startup
He could be their backup ISP.
instead of spending 1000s of dollars buying all the equipment in USA, mauch should buy everything from india for less than half the price
Btw why not starlink?
Starlink is amazing, but not as amazing as an actual fiber running to your house. If you can get actual fiber then you should. The primary reason is that it has very high headroom for future expansion. You might be getting 1Gbps today, but any individual fiber can actually carry 100Tbps (or 100,000 gigabits per second) using commercial equipment. The speed record is higher still, so there is plenty of scope for further upgrades in the future.
Do keep in mind, however, that residential service is usually provided by GPON or XGPON. Instead of a single fiber running from every single customer to the ISP, optical splitters are used so that up to 128 customers can share a single fiber. The fiber is run at 50Gbps or 100Gbps or whatever, and the individual customers share that using TDMA. That does somewhat limit the available headroom. Speaking just for myself, I would be entirely satisfied by a 1Tbps slice of that 100Tbps of available bandwidth.
> Under the contract terms, Mauch will provide 100Mbps symmetrical Internet with unlimited data for $55 a month and 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month. Mauch said his installation fees are typically $199. Unlike many larger ISPs, Mauch provides simple bills that contain a single line item for Internet service and no extra fees.
For one, Starlink won't get anywhere close to 1gbps
Reformed ISP owner here: don't do this. There's a reason the cableco/telco doesn't want to serve these customers.
What reason? Do you have an experience to share?
The reason being greed.
Let's hope he actually delivers. This company took $9MM of government grants and squandered it:
https://mynews4.com/on-your-side/ask-joe/ask-joe-usda-cuts-t...
The article documents delivery, and a little searching told me that Washtenaw Fiber Properties is still in business at https://washftth.com/ and serving customers.
Amateur operation. Large ISPs have squandered billions.
Should have stolen billions instead, could have become a titan of industry
you could review their coverage map and they taking 2025 signups. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=1f72...