I greatly respect the initiative and scrappy-ness of someone doing this. And the legacy providers are clearly sitting on their monopoly position in a way that makes their pathetic alternative so starkly unattractive.
But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do this cheaply?
Namely:
-- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
-- customers who need 24 hour customer service
-- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
-- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
-- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
-- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Maybe none of this rises to the level of making it fundamentally different or unsustainable? But it seems to me the honeymoon phase doesn't last long, and it's got to hit some unavoidable realities soon. At least, if you think you can replicate this, it requires finding people and neighbors who are willing to do actual work and investment/concern to make something like this possible, and not simply pay a vendor a premium to phone it in. It must be treated like a neighbor-to-neighbor community project, not a faceless commercial transaction with its attendant obligations.
I'm going to skate past the fact that difficult customers and maintenance aren't why monopolies are expensive, in fact they're the things that are most amenable to economies of scale, so bigger gets cheaper.
The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal have to be to defeat and replace Comcast rather than to supply internet service to his neighbors?
He doesn’t of course. Local/muni/coop last mile is a well worn path. It’s your local volunteer fire department, but for internet, and local self reliance is not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to grow, it doesn’t have to constantly evolve, it just has to work and be reliable. That is what infrastructure does, and when it does so, it’s mostly invisible (and I argue, that is its most beautiful form).
the same reason one would file for patents without any intent of enforcing them. For defense and security.
I would say that to attempt to have zero growth/shrinkage is difficult in business. The market is always changing, people's preferences change, etc. If you try to stagnate you will likely find yourself shrinking, either because demand changes, or there are mixups in supply (competitors).
If shrinking is the only non-goal, then growth is likely the only prevention since stagnation is hard to ensure.
Since we are asking why questions. Why does everyone else have to support them with tax money when it costs 30k to run a wire to a house? If there is no prospect of scaling it further to boost local infrastructure, then they should be footing the bill themselves or use Starlink.
I'm not convinced this is the case. The big thing that makes telco's such profit making machines is that wires in the ground are generally a large capital expense that doesn't really provide a great marketplace for competition. But once you've got that infrastructure, it's hard to duplicate. The rest of the equipment and employees relatively aren't that expensive.
So the power is on the provider here, there isn't really another choice for customers if the article is to be believed, no matter how good or bad the company is. Sure there might be disputes with vendors, but that's just part of any business.
The biggest threat IMO is probably some sort of competition. Maybe a big telco decides to wire up the area, although then they would be the second player in the market trying to steal customers who may not be interested in switching. Or if this really is a rural area, things like wireless last mile (basically LTE), Starlink, OneWeb, etc may start to be more compelling options if they get the capacity, latency, and price point to the right spot to be competitive.
It seems that the ISP motivation comes from lack of other options. Should a viable competitor emerge, that might be considered a "win" w.r.t rural customers having good broadband choices.
Not sure how Canada compares but these concerns haven't stopped the biggest telecoms in Canada from providing subpar service under very restrictive terms and conditions with no accountability. Namely, a 12 hour complete outage by Rogers to which the reply was basically a big shrug. If they can get away with that I am sure a small independant provider can get away with that as well.
> -- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or not do business with whoever they want, provided they’re not refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or federal law.
> -- customers who need 24 hour customer service
Also easy. You are under no obligation to meet peoples unrealistic demands or needs.
> -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
He already is familiar with third party contracting.
> -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
Frivolous lawsuits are a risk in any business in America.
> -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
What is this "next technology requirement"? My area cable company still runs most their network on 30 year old lines.
> -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Cost of doing business, doesn't matter the size.
I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal broadband can be. It's why big players spend so much lobbying and bribing so they can keep their established position running and keep the gravy train running, but really the economics of it are fantastic once you've done the initial digging and running the lines, which sounds like he has here.
At $55 /mo for 400 households he's bringing in $22,000 a month plus whatever federal and local government subsidies and grants. The odds of a disaster, or one of the other scenarios you mentioned happening anytime soon is low, so he will have runway to build a decent sized war-chest to be able to easily afford handling any of these scenarios with third party contractors. The more houses he brings on line, the better it gets.
Right, but that's OPs point. If he does what you say, he's no better than Comcast, ignoring customers and telling them to screw themselves at the first sign of trouble.
> Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or not do business with whoever they want, provided they’re not refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or federal law.
Then isn't this a point against the scalability / feasibility of this idea working broadly for others or becoming a model for replacing dumb telcos?
If part of the reason telcos are the way they are is because they have to serve everyone, and at some point if you run a service like this you will run into that requirement, then you will too become like a telco because of those obligations. And this is just one example of a factor that starts to matter.
I try to help out in my HOA of 25 people to manage the utilities, infrastructure, landscaping, and even with this small a group people are uncooperative and 1-2 people are constantly questioning and threatening to sue if we don't do what they say. Hundreds/thousands of people is even more a nightmare.
>I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal broadband can be.
Operating the network might be profitable. Recouping installation costs are not, when Comcast and other coaxial cable internet providers are sitting there ready to undercut you the second you enter the market. Unfortunately, sufficient customers are not willing to pay more for a reliable symmetric fiber connection yet over whatever the cable company is offering with meager upload.
Also, I assume you mean fiber when you wrote “municipal broadband”. I thought municipal broadband refers to taxpayer funded internet networks, where there would be no profit required (and hence is the only alternative to getting a better internet connection than the cable company).
In Minneapolis there is a local fiber provider which charges about the same for the same level of fiber connectivity. I think it's pretty sustainable.
It looks like his revenue is going to be $50k/mo in not so long and that's more than enough to have a couple of people willing to work on an as-needed hourly rate and to cover whatever issues come up.
Not everything need to scale. A good way to handle this kind of project is keep it at a certain community size, and if people want in, beyond a certain threshold, they need to build their own. This is how federated internet providers work usually.
I, too, greatly respect the scrappy-ness of this individual. Kudos to him for sticking it to Comcast. That said, I'm not wild about the notion of dropping $30K of our collective money on running fiber to a single home out in the country.
I don't see anything wrong with "collectively" deciding that every American citizen should have access to high speed internet access and putting our money where our mouth is. Especially remote areas that are expanding and will become increasingly populated to take advantage of the infrastructure.
For most of us, it doesn't cost anywhere near that much to get access so we can handle the rare costs to build out to remote areas where it's more expensive. That's the benefit of collective money. No one person has to shoulder the burden alone and together we each only chip in a small amount to achieve a massive goal.
America should be heavily investing in building out select remote areas now because we're going to be getting much more crowded in the decades ahead. Climate change is going to force people inland, away from the western US, and cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from around the planet to seek relocation. The US is going to have to do our part to help take many of them in. MI is a pretty good place to expand.
I have to presume his marketing costs will be close to zero. On tge other hand, in my area (central NJ) both Comcast and Verizon spend a ton on marketing.
He'll also have zero churn. So that's got to help the bottomline.
Finally, I'm willing to bet it helps raise local home prices as those who had to have proper broadband were effectively excluded from that market. The point being, some homes will be able and will to pay more.
Certainly the future will be different, the comparison to traditional ISPs might not be reliable either.
That was my first ISP password assigned to me from San Jose based ix.netcom.com (Also the city I was grounded a month for running a $926 long distance bill calling into BBSs to play trade wars and the pit)
But the best ISP I ever had was a 56K dial-up in Seattle. To play Diablo.
Except, potentially, for locates. In my conversation with one of our local ISPs that for a while was doing fiber builds but then stopped, locates were quite a nuisance for them. This was in a less rural location though.
Are you saying that Comcast provides decent customer service? because I think it is probably the first or second reason everyone hates them... another one could be the doubling cost yearly unless you call them and are serious about cancelling.
Where I'm at Comcast is very reliable but I've had different experiences.
I recognized his name from providing hosting for the outages.org list[0] – if you haven't subscribed, and you do anything operations at all, go hit the button now.
I'm being a bit lazy here but do you happen to know if there is a way to consume this programatically? I'm thinking RSS or perhaps an API?
Edit: For the benefit of others who might be interested, I've just subscribed using Feedbin's [0] email-to-RSS feature so updates will appear in my RSS reader!
ASN = Autonomous System Number (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_System_Number), it's a number which identifies an ISP in the core Internet routing protocol (BGP). A low ASN usually means your ISP has been part of the Internet for a long time; other than the 16-bit vs 32-bit ASN distinction, it has no practical effect, besides implying that your ISP is one of the "old-timers".
ASN is an Autonomous System Number. An ISP is the primary example of an Autonomous System. There are other organizations that have ASNs like data centers.
The internet is decentralized. Basically, each autonomous system is its own network. This means that they need to connect with one another in order to allow traffic between each other. This is called peering. In order to peer with another network you must have an ASN.
RFC 5575 is a widely adopted specification implemented by router vendors that lets ISPs (think Comcast, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Akamai) block certain kinds of traffic at their routers using rules called "Flow Specifications". A rule looks _something_ like "Drop traffic if it's on Port 80 and its packet size is 252 bits". That level of logic is good enough to block many simple DDoS attacks, and since it's done on a router, it's hardware that the ISP has to buy anyway. The more expensive / but also more powerful solution usually involves a dedicated piece of hardware that does packet inspection.
The RFC number is less interesting then the ASN; he has a low ASN, which is for backbone nerds a little like getting a very short domain name; the short ones are long since exhausted, so it's like an O.G. indicator.
(An ASN is a BGP4 network number; think of it as an address in the backbone routing network.)
"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."
That's over $11 per feet. That sounds about right. I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed at one of my houses (in the US), going down a very long driveway, with 3 patch panels, 2 at each end and one in the middle at a gate. That was just for my LAN, not internet access. I needed the link to hook up intercoms and security cameras. I absolutely wanted 100% reliability of the network link, so wireless solutions wouldn't have been adequate. The previous homeowner had buried a cat5e line in the first 500 feet, with a cat5e repeater (underground), but its electronics failed after a couple years and its exact location couldn't be found. And he had not even put the cable in conduit.
I'm going to put my hand up and say I have absolutely no idea how an ISP works. He runs cables to each house in the area... now where does the other end go?
There is a very good Ars Technica article on how an ISP works. It traces the whole network, from submarine cable through to last mile into a house. It was written in 2016, but I imagine it's still relevant:
Thank you, that was a great link for us uninitiated folks.
Also another great plug for ArsTechnica (even though the main article is them as well, and I'm sure most of this audience is well aware of them) and the excellent technical writing they do.
There are wholesalers that provide "dark fiber", then you buy data services from another "wholesaler". When I looked into it, dark fiber was available through some utilities and through a government funded non-profit. Data to light-up the fiber was available through several different data centers that connected to that dark fiber.
You still had to build-out the last mile though, and thats what will get you. You either need private easements, or be a registered telecom utility to use public utility easements. That last mile is $20k +/-, depending on your circumstances. If your semi-rural or less, there's ROI sucks. Hence, many smaller ISPs are wireless.
At least in area, there are already a number of wISPs, 5G is rolling out, Starlink eventually. and lots of gov't funding going to the big players to expand their networks (and drive the start-ups out of business.)
There some other business models out there too that look interesting. Underline in Co Springs, for example. They provide a basic tier of service, in order to qualify as a telecom, install the fiber and then allow multiple competing ISPs to use their network.
IMHO, any utility that has the benefit of government privilege should be required to allow competors to use the infrastructure that the taxpayers funded.
I'm waiting on one of you brilliant folks to defy the laws of physics to create a decentralized, wireless mesh internet.
These guys have dark fiber right in front of my neighborhood. They service cell sites for Dish Network near me as well. It's interesting to look through their services. For example, you can get fiber service with layer 2, where you're responsible for adding your IP stack over top of it. Or you can buy at layer 3, where Segra is already running a stack, and establish mesh connectivity. So if a fiber is cut, you'll get another working path. Build your network over the top.
Pretty interesting to understand what's available.
Last mile subsidies are super weird. I was looking at a property in montana in the middle of nowhere that had no electricity nearby, but had gigabit fiber. I called the ISP and it was cheaper to get phone+Gb than just Gb due to subsidy rules.
Basically everyone out there (including me) is on starlink now. Turns out the subsidies were not only inefficient, but pretty pointless.
I can't find any section of that guide that talks about peering or whatever ISPs are supposed to do to connect to the broader internet. Do you see any step that explains this?
As the other commenters have pointed out, a possibility is simply to "resell" transit from other providers. However, on the Internet all peering networks are somewhat equal and it's entirely possible to extend the "other end" over time to establish dedicated peering with other networks, so that for example traffic from your network to Youtube doesn't have to go through (paid-for) 3rd parties.
There's good chances there are Internet eXchange Points around where you live where for a small maintenance fee anyone can come and place their router and cables to interconnect with others.
So the likely steps are:
1) Find a transit provider, that will serve your trafic to any other network, and where to connect with this provider
2) (Optional) If you don't have the necessary infrastructure, find another provider to get from your last-mile network to your transit provider
3) (Optional) Find other networks to peer with so that you can significantly reduce your transit bill and provide better routes (therefore better service)
Some non-profit ISPs take the problem from the other side, and build a core network without necessarily owning any last-mile infrastructure, which is leased from other operators (opérateurs de collecte) with whom they interconnect at some datacenter/IXP. The most famous example of that in France is FDN.fr which has been operating since early 90s. That approach is more cost-effective in high-density area where the local infrastructure is already quite good, and construction jobs to lay new cables is very costly, but will still set you back 10-30€/month/line.
I think you more or less just buy connections from bigger ISPs, so for example you get a 100 Gbps connection to one location and distribute it to your end users from there.
Most of the equipment you can buy, you can even get a lot of the needed things as a service. You just need to organize all those hardware and software things, and get the economic and legal part right too. And in the end it needs to tie together in a way, that your earnings are bigger then your expenses.
I think it’s not so different to opening a car repair shop for example. Just more nerdy.
Depending on how close they are he could run cables (ethernet) or fiber. Single mode fiber can go 10km according to some Ubiquiti spec sheets I found on google. Ubiquiti also sells AirMax products that can do PTP or PTMP over the air, although some will be affected by rain. They could even rent space from a radio/cell tower. There are probably a decent amount of other products out there I am only familiar with Ubiquiti.
The costs for internet in the US still surprises me, how on earth can it be so expensive?! I understand some countries, but in the US, it seems high costs are because "because we can", not because it has to be like that.
In comparison, you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month. In some, you even get it for under $10/month (like Romania, which has surprisingly awesome internet infrastructure).
>The costs for internet in the US still surprises me, how on earth can it be so expensive?!
Monopolies and regulatory capture. I can't get ANY wired ISP where I'm at. Even AT&T ADSL which was like .5Mbps and ~50% packet loss terminated service to our neighborhood, saying the copper is too degraded. Comcast, for some reason, told us that to wire the entire neighborhood would cost them $73000 dollars, but they won't do it. That was 3 years ago. I'd have paid them 4000 dollars since then for business gigabit by now. I have been kicked off of multiple MVNO's (not for my abuse, but because AT&T/Verizon terminated their ability to sell SIMs for modem use).
My only current option is T-Mobile's home internet service (via LTE/5g), which works well most of the time but has some pretty ridiculous outages at least once a week. I gave Elon my 100 bucks years ago when they said we'd have starlink available by EOY 2021. They're now saying Q3 2023.
Comcast has 189,000 employees who make US salaries. It costs a lot less to dig a trench in Romania than in Seattle.
You can look at the profit margins. 11.3% for Comcast as of June 2022. That tells me they aren't simply collecting the difference between US and Romanian internet prices in profit.
Of course, far be it from me to defend Comcast, but this is basically just the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP)
On the more measurable side I would imagine the cost of lines correlates with population density. Running wires to 100 single family homes is way more expensive than running the wires to a district of apartment buildings
As much as I hate the high price where I live (Canada) I assume that Internet and wireless phone service is expensive because the country is so large that the build out cost is expensive. The USA is running 3/4 in the list of largest countries by land area and Canada is 2nd[1]. Maybe I'm naive in my thinking but I have family in a teeny tiny European country and they all have 1Gb fibre optic service for cheap-cheap.
I pay ~55$ a month for gigabit in the US. It’s that there are so many different states with different regulations that means we have both extremes generally.
Comcast charges $100/mo for 1Gbps where I'm at in a suburb of Salt Lake City. Our city announced a partnership with Google Fiber that will begin rolling out in 6-8 months. After that happened, I've started getting Comcast adverts to sign a 2 year contract...I also expect to see their prices start dropping soon.
> charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps
And, in my experience, they will slowly ratchet up the cost until you call in and complain or change your plan, so a negotiated 80 dollars slowly can become 160+
I only can use Windstream as the other providers are right on the edge of my area and refuse to move in. I only get “50Mbps” (It's never gone above 45) for $90+ a month, and they have been forever increasing it because well, what choice do we have.
I use a smaller ISP in Washington state and my 1G symmetrical line just went from $79 to $59 a month and they increased my upload, it used to not be symmetrical.
This is kind of an interesting illustration of how little people know about how the internet works, and how news is ultimately entertainment.
Full respect to the man in the article for the hard work and initiative he took in starting a small independent ISP, but this story is the story of thousands of small ISPs in the US and many more around the world.
In a basic sense, this story is not "newsworthy" since there is nothing new about it. It's more of a human interest piece, like if the reporter wrote a story about the lady who started a coffee shop after being overcharged for a Frappuccino.
I'm guessing this ISP has gotten more attention here and on Ars Technica than others because the founder is fluent in the software engineering world, as well as having started an ISP. Ironically there is a pretty big gulf between the world of techies who know how to write the code on the internet and the people who actually build the internet who are more blue collar.
One of my coworkers also did this but went the cell tower route. Had no idea you could just install a cell tower without mountains of red tape and huge expense but hey. Then all his "customers" (i.e neighbors) have antennas on their house pointed right at it and boom, internet. He only had to front the cost of getting the lines run to one location.
There are extremely competent programmers (10x) like there are outstanding players in sports and music. They do have an outsized impact on the projects they work on. However, they are also extremely rare. The problem, IMHO, comes from cult-startups where they think they can (a) identify these people in an interview (b) build a team of only 10x programmers.
This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they are smart and their interview process is infallible.
So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual banter :).
Then good luck hiring a well sized team when you’ve set the expectation that everyone needs to be a genius to contribute. A successful startup needs to either attract only the best engineers or build itself so that most of the work can be done by merely good engineers following the company’s engineering culture.
10x engineers are a myth when it comes to productivity working within a team. There are absolutely 10x engineers when they're working on a project more or less completely solo.
I have met 10x engineers. They solve a problem in an hour that takes me all day and which someone else might never be able to solve. They identify and solve problems I couldn't even begin to tackle. In that sense, they're not really 10x but qualitatively superior.
A+ comment. I've been hearing this idea that "there is no such thing as a 10x engineer" for almost a decade now and from the very first moment I heard it I considered it one of the most definitively untrue ideas circulating in the tech industry. In fact, there are 100x engineers.
Most the criticisms of the "10x engineer" thing I've seen were more about this expectation that everyone can be 10x, when they're more the exception than the rule. Your average programmer is just that: average.
The reason people say it's a myth is because the study that purported to identify this concept was found to have an extremely small population and confounding factors. In addition if I remember correctly it tried to do this identification by using a contrived programming problem.
There are obviously software devs who are more productive than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is thinking that (a) companies can somehow identify these people in advance, and (b) it is better to prioritize building a team with these supposed rock stars than it is to build a team of potentially average developers who know how to work together, and then properly manage, support & motivate them. A team of ten properly supported 1.5x programmers will beat out one 10x programmer every time. And in many cases the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type does not play well with others.
I'm a firm believer that any genuinely interested, motivated and at least mildly intelligent dev can be made highly productive by finding the right fit. It's far more important for companies to focus on fit and on ensuring that their own managers actually know how to manage than on trying to tap into a hidden stream of 10x devs.
I guess it boils down to the fact that I think many companies absolve themselves and their mgmt team of blame for poor performance by saying "well we just haven't been able to identify 10x devs yet." They expect to be able to hire a single employee who will save the day for them, rather than hiring and training good mgmt.
I’ve met people other people called 10x engineers. Once you looked soberly at the development process that illusion has faded every time.
Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally formulated it’s meant to be between your worst and best engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot, inattentive, sheltered, or all three.
Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in sick. They have negative outcomes all the time, which means everyone else in the team is infinity times as productive.
What the rest of us think is 10x versus an adequate developer, and there are almost none of those. Are there people who can work solo and produce as much as a team of 10? Sure, but that’s because of the communication overhead. Can that person join a team of ten and double their output? Only if they are a unicorn among unicorns. The easiest way to double the output of a team is to double the output of the team members. And that doesn’t make you look more productive than them. If you’re not very careful it makes you look less productive.
I've long felt that there's a relatively simple formula for productivity:
Productivity = (Time * Effort)^Talent
People like Buckminster Fuller come to mind. Especially because of this quote of his:
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
That also depends on the X, from my experience working at FAANGs, startups, etc... I have never seen a 10x engineer in good teams, I have only seen "10x engineers" on teams without great engineers. The comparison with sports and music is pretty silly, as those are environment where the winner(s) take all (there can only be one Billie Eillish (lol) even tho there are many singers who are better), engineering is often a team effort. In the other hand, the best engineers I have seen, just spend more time than anybody else working on a problem, and often are the ones who like to show off more, and very often lack the skills in other areas of life.
I’ve seen too many prolific engineers who destroy the confidence and productivity of people around them. These are not people you want to aspire to be.
If we get to expand the definition from a software engineer on a team to a business founder, do we also get to call the fiber optics 10X engineers? Is a truck driver delivering laptops a 10X engineer?
It's a coping mechanism like lying on the couch watching the Olympics and getting angry that some people are able to push themselves to incredible feats instead of being happy for them.
Never understood that mindset, when I see 100x engineering feats like TempleOS or αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblεs it inspires me to learn more and think outside the box.
Readit News
But isn't it also true that once his network grows above a certain customer base (and gets into the maintenance phase), he will start to see all the effects that eat into being able to do this cheaply?
Namely:
-- customers who don't behave as well or kindly as before
-- customers who need 24 hour customer service
-- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
-- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
-- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
-- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Maybe none of this rises to the level of making it fundamentally different or unsustainable? But it seems to me the honeymoon phase doesn't last long, and it's got to hit some unavoidable realities soon. At least, if you think you can replicate this, it requires finding people and neighbors who are willing to do actual work and investment/concern to make something like this possible, and not simply pay a vendor a premium to phone it in. It must be treated like a neighbor-to-neighbor community project, not a faceless commercial transaction with its attendant obligations.
The real question is: why does he have to get larger than the 600 homes in his nearby rural area, ever? Why does his goal have to be to defeat and replace Comcast rather than to supply internet service to his neighbors?
https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/
https://muninetworks.org/
I would say that to attempt to have zero growth/shrinkage is difficult in business. The market is always changing, people's preferences change, etc. If you try to stagnate you will likely find yourself shrinking, either because demand changes, or there are mixups in supply (competitors).
If shrinking is the only non-goal, then growth is likely the only prevention since stagnation is hard to ensure.
So the power is on the provider here, there isn't really another choice for customers if the article is to be believed, no matter how good or bad the company is. Sure there might be disputes with vendors, but that's just part of any business.
The biggest threat IMO is probably some sort of competition. Maybe a big telco decides to wire up the area, although then they would be the second player in the market trying to steal customers who may not be interested in switching. Or if this really is a rural area, things like wireless last mile (basically LTE), Starlink, OneWeb, etc may start to be more compelling options if they get the capacity, latency, and price point to the right spot to be competitive.
Look at what this guy is doing. Many millions to get 600 customers paying <$100 a month.
Easy. Refuse service. You aren't legally obligated to offer your service to assholes. Any business has the right to do or not do business with whoever they want, provided they’re not refusing service for a reason that violates local, state, or federal law.
> -- customers who need 24 hour customer service
Also easy. You are under no obligation to meet peoples unrealistic demands or needs.
> -- maintenance that can't be done himself, and he has to employ people
He already is familiar with third party contracting.
> -- customers and vendors who sue you for breach of contract, or other simply nuisance lawsuits
Frivolous lawsuits are a risk in any business in America.
> -- upgrading the network to the next technology requirement, or when he's unable to get 2nd-hand parts so cheaply, etc.
What is this "next technology requirement"? My area cable company still runs most their network on 30 year old lines.
> -- or a natural disaster that unexpectedly forces replacement of (and charging for) equipment that wasn't anticipated in the original subscriber price
Cost of doing business, doesn't matter the size.
I think people don't understand just how profitable municipal broadband can be. It's why big players spend so much lobbying and bribing so they can keep their established position running and keep the gravy train running, but really the economics of it are fantastic once you've done the initial digging and running the lines, which sounds like he has here.
At $55 /mo for 400 households he's bringing in $22,000 a month plus whatever federal and local government subsidies and grants. The odds of a disaster, or one of the other scenarios you mentioned happening anytime soon is low, so he will have runway to build a decent sized war-chest to be able to easily afford handling any of these scenarios with third party contractors. The more houses he brings on line, the better it gets.
Then isn't this a point against the scalability / feasibility of this idea working broadly for others or becoming a model for replacing dumb telcos?
If part of the reason telcos are the way they are is because they have to serve everyone, and at some point if you run a service like this you will run into that requirement, then you will too become like a telco because of those obligations. And this is just one example of a factor that starts to matter.
I try to help out in my HOA of 25 people to manage the utilities, infrastructure, landscaping, and even with this small a group people are uncooperative and 1-2 people are constantly questioning and threatening to sue if we don't do what they say. Hundreds/thousands of people is even more a nightmare.
Operating the network might be profitable. Recouping installation costs are not, when Comcast and other coaxial cable internet providers are sitting there ready to undercut you the second you enter the market. Unfortunately, sufficient customers are not willing to pay more for a reliable symmetric fiber connection yet over whatever the cable company is offering with meager upload.
Also, I assume you mean fiber when you wrote “municipal broadband”. I thought municipal broadband refers to taxpayer funded internet networks, where there would be no profit required (and hence is the only alternative to getting a better internet connection than the cable company).
It looks like his revenue is going to be $50k/mo in not so long and that's more than enough to have a couple of people willing to work on an as-needed hourly rate and to cover whatever issues come up.
For most of us, it doesn't cost anywhere near that much to get access so we can handle the rare costs to build out to remote areas where it's more expensive. That's the benefit of collective money. No one person has to shoulder the burden alone and together we each only chip in a small amount to achieve a massive goal.
America should be heavily investing in building out select remote areas now because we're going to be getting much more crowded in the decades ahead. Climate change is going to force people inland, away from the western US, and cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from around the planet to seek relocation. The US is going to have to do our part to help take many of them in. MI is a pretty good place to expand.
Rural electrification and rural landline were also subsidized, so there is some knowledge of how to build rural infra via subsidies.
He'll also have zero churn. So that's got to help the bottomline.
Finally, I'm willing to bet it helps raise local home prices as those who had to have proper broadband were effectively excluded from that market. The point being, some homes will be able and will to pay more.
Certainly the future will be different, the comparison to traditional ISPs might not be reliable either.
That was my first ISP password assigned to me from San Jose based ix.netcom.com (Also the city I was grounded a month for running a $926 long distance bill calling into BBSs to play trade wars and the pit)
But the best ISP I ever had was a 56K dial-up in Seattle. To play Diablo.
I am looking to build an ISP.
Where I'm at Comcast is very reliable but I've had different experiences.
His little ISP is AS267, which is a SHOCKINGLY low number. That's like.. the ISP equiv of a 4 digit slashdot id, or owning something like sodapop.com.
He's also one of the authors of RFC 5575, which is a pretty big deal in the DDoS world.
There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)
[0]: https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
I'm being a bit lazy here but do you happen to know if there is a way to consume this programatically? I'm thinking RSS or perhaps an API?
Edit: For the benefit of others who might be interested, I've just subscribed using Feedbin's [0] email-to-RSS feature so updates will appear in my RSS reader!
[0] https://feedbin.com
The internet is decentralized. Basically, each autonomous system is its own network. This means that they need to connect with one another in order to allow traffic between each other. This is called peering. In order to peer with another network you must have an ASN.
The number doesn't matter.
(An ASN is a BGP4 network number; think of it as an address in the backbone routing network.)
Here's this one:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5575.html
Deleted Comment
That's over $11 per feet. That sounds about right. I paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed at one of my houses (in the US), going down a very long driveway, with 3 patch panels, 2 at each end and one in the middle at a gate. That was just for my LAN, not internet access. I needed the link to hook up intercoms and security cameras. I absolutely wanted 100% reliability of the network link, so wireless solutions wouldn't have been adequate. The previous homeowner had buried a cat5e line in the first 500 feet, with a cat5e repeater (underground), but its electronics failed after a couple years and its exact location couldn't be found. And he had not even put the cable in conduit.
Are you saying you paid $18,000 for fiber optic installation at your house?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
Also another great plug for ArsTechnica (even though the main article is them as well, and I'm sure most of this audience is well aware of them) and the excellent technical writing they do.
You still had to build-out the last mile though, and thats what will get you. You either need private easements, or be a registered telecom utility to use public utility easements. That last mile is $20k +/-, depending on your circumstances. If your semi-rural or less, there's ROI sucks. Hence, many smaller ISPs are wireless.
At least in area, there are already a number of wISPs, 5G is rolling out, Starlink eventually. and lots of gov't funding going to the big players to expand their networks (and drive the start-ups out of business.)
There some other business models out there too that look interesting. Underline in Co Springs, for example. They provide a basic tier of service, in order to qualify as a telecom, install the fiber and then allow multiple competing ISPs to use their network.
IMHO, any utility that has the benefit of government privilege should be required to allow competors to use the infrastructure that the taxpayers funded.
I'm waiting on one of you brilliant folks to defy the laws of physics to create a decentralized, wireless mesh internet.
These guys have dark fiber right in front of my neighborhood. They service cell sites for Dish Network near me as well. It's interesting to look through their services. For example, you can get fiber service with layer 2, where you're responsible for adding your IP stack over top of it. Or you can buy at layer 3, where Segra is already running a stack, and establish mesh connectivity. So if a fiber is cut, you'll get another working path. Build your network over the top.
Pretty interesting to understand what's available.
Basically everyone out there (including me) is on starlink now. Turns out the subsidies were not only inefficient, but pretty pointless.
https://startyourownisp.com/
There's good chances there are Internet eXchange Points around where you live where for a small maintenance fee anyone can come and place their router and cables to interconnect with others.
So the likely steps are:
1) Find a transit provider, that will serve your trafic to any other network, and where to connect with this provider 2) (Optional) If you don't have the necessary infrastructure, find another provider to get from your last-mile network to your transit provider 3) (Optional) Find other networks to peer with so that you can significantly reduce your transit bill and provide better routes (therefore better service)
Some non-profit ISPs take the problem from the other side, and build a core network without necessarily owning any last-mile infrastructure, which is leased from other operators (opérateurs de collecte) with whom they interconnect at some datacenter/IXP. The most famous example of that in France is FDN.fr which has been operating since early 90s. That approach is more cost-effective in high-density area where the local infrastructure is already quite good, and construction jobs to lay new cables is very costly, but will still set you back 10-30€/month/line.
Most of the equipment you can buy, you can even get a lot of the needed things as a service. You just need to organize all those hardware and software things, and get the economic and legal part right too. And in the end it needs to tie together in a way, that your earnings are bigger then your expenses.
I think it’s not so different to opening a car repair shop for example. Just more nerdy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Wow, sign me up. Comcast, which has a monopoly on my market, charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps.
In comparison, you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month. In some, you even get it for under $10/month (like Romania, which has surprisingly awesome internet infrastructure).
Monopolies and regulatory capture. I can't get ANY wired ISP where I'm at. Even AT&T ADSL which was like .5Mbps and ~50% packet loss terminated service to our neighborhood, saying the copper is too degraded. Comcast, for some reason, told us that to wire the entire neighborhood would cost them $73000 dollars, but they won't do it. That was 3 years ago. I'd have paid them 4000 dollars since then for business gigabit by now. I have been kicked off of multiple MVNO's (not for my abuse, but because AT&T/Verizon terminated their ability to sell SIMs for modem use).
My only current option is T-Mobile's home internet service (via LTE/5g), which works well most of the time but has some pretty ridiculous outages at least once a week. I gave Elon my 100 bucks years ago when they said we'd have starlink available by EOY 2021. They're now saying Q3 2023.
These ISP's have us over a barrel in the states.
You can look at the profit margins. 11.3% for Comcast as of June 2022. That tells me they aren't simply collecting the difference between US and Romanian internet prices in profit.
Of course, far be it from me to defend Comcast, but this is basically just the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
I suspect that decisionmakers in the US think that symmetric connections encourage communism.
And, in my experience, they will slowly ratchet up the cost until you call in and complain or change your plan, so a negotiated 80 dollars slowly can become 160+
Come to Minneapolis. 1 Gbps for $70.
Full respect to the man in the article for the hard work and initiative he took in starting a small independent ISP, but this story is the story of thousands of small ISPs in the US and many more around the world.
In a basic sense, this story is not "newsworthy" since there is nothing new about it. It's more of a human interest piece, like if the reporter wrote a story about the lady who started a coffee shop after being overcharged for a Frappuccino.
I'm guessing this ISP has gotten more attention here and on Ars Technica than others because the founder is fluent in the software engineering world, as well as having started an ISP. Ironically there is a pretty big gulf between the world of techies who know how to write the code on the internet and the people who actually build the internet who are more blue collar.
This results in (c) calling a whole lot of average programmers they hired as 10x programmers because of (a). After all, they are smart and their interview process is infallible.
So, if you meet one of those rare folks, enjoy the intellectual banter :).
There are obviously software devs who are more productive than the average. This is true of every skill. The myth is thinking that (a) companies can somehow identify these people in advance, and (b) it is better to prioritize building a team with these supposed rock stars than it is to build a team of potentially average developers who know how to work together, and then properly manage, support & motivate them. A team of ten properly supported 1.5x programmers will beat out one 10x programmer every time. And in many cases the "I'm a 10x dev" personality type does not play well with others.
I'm a firm believer that any genuinely interested, motivated and at least mildly intelligent dev can be made highly productive by finding the right fit. It's far more important for companies to focus on fit and on ensuring that their own managers actually know how to manage than on trying to tap into a hidden stream of 10x devs.
I guess it boils down to the fact that I think many companies absolve themselves and their mgmt team of blame for poor performance by saying "well we just haven't been able to identify 10x devs yet." They expect to be able to hire a single employee who will save the day for them, rather than hiring and training good mgmt.
Part of the problem with the myth is that as originally formulated it’s meant to be between your worst and best engineer, and whoever came up with that idea is an idiot, inattentive, sheltered, or all three.
Why? Because the worst engineers help the team by calling in sick. They have negative outcomes all the time, which means everyone else in the team is infinity times as productive.
What the rest of us think is 10x versus an adequate developer, and there are almost none of those. Are there people who can work solo and produce as much as a team of 10? Sure, but that’s because of the communication overhead. Can that person join a team of ten and double their output? Only if they are a unicorn among unicorns. The easiest way to double the output of a team is to double the output of the team members. And that doesn’t make you look more productive than them. If you’re not very careful it makes you look less productive.
Productivity = (Time * Effort)^Talent
People like Buckminster Fuller come to mind. Especially because of this quote of his:
>“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Never understood that mindset, when I see 100x engineering feats like TempleOS or αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblεs it inspires me to learn more and think outside the box.