I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road.
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main reason is that any service that is not widely used will have gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's always the same handful of customers hitting problems or finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if something goes wrong with IPv4, it's going to be noticed very quickly.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
For me, no IPv6 = no business. I don't think it's acceptable to build a network on IPv4 only at this point, it speaks to being willing to cut corners and not do things the right way just because it's easier.
Thankfully, they are doing IPv6, although one day I had some weird issue where IPv6 was broken but if I disabled it ipv4 was still working. Could have been my fault, IPv6 is generally new to me (not much of a network person).
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.
> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets).
Yeah they’ve offered unlimited for a few years now for an additional charge. Now as of last month all plans are unlimited if you just update to them. It wound up being cheaper for me too.
However I still applaud these guys. There needs to be more competition.
Comcast similarly removed their 1.2TB cap in my neighborhood within months of us getting fiber. It's almost like the only reason for the cap was because they could get away with it when there wasn't any competition.
Comcast is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any other real options. Just before Google Fiber was activated in my area, Comcast stepped up their game big time. The only problem is that they had spent years nickel and diming me for actual connection speeds that didn't even come close to their advertised rates, and their latency/jitter is garbage compared to fiber. Comcast clearly doesn't want to have to compete. In their defense, their connection was rarely down.
Correct. It was a very calculated decision. They were squeezing out profits by trying to move heavy users to the next tier of service. But this only works if they have a monopoly.
Feature-wise it doesn't matter because you're still going to have to play the price haggling game. Other providers don't renegotiate every 6 months like they do. They have more in common with Waste Management than with a respectable ISP.
I'm on the other side of the country and was a Cox customer for over a decade until they decided to add a data cap to their plans. Fortunately, wyyred rolled into town right around the same time, offering fiber at higher speeds, no data caps, and half the cost. It was an easy decision. I also noticed that Cox is now advertising unlimited data for free. Too little too late.
I love how these guys are trying to sort the lack of competition in broadband, stood up and did something about it and all the geeks on HN are upset that they are not doing something that the majority of their customers would not give shit about or even come close to understanding.
Everyone here that has started a company to challenge the entrenched monopoly raise your hands please.
I understand the tech deeply and that does not translate to the practical needs of trying to run a successful business.
This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.
Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
I’ve been hearing about “captured government” with respect to fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill isn’t working, because for the most part that’s not the real problem.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.
I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But in other places it has definitely happened.
If you think internet in the bay area is shit then you haven't seen how bad it can get. Even other large cities within California like LA and SD are worse.
Maybe it's good enough that not very many people care. I moved around San Jose, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Sunnyvale, never noticed problems with Comcast or AT&T. Was expecting flakiness after hearing all these bad stories, but no, it was reliable.
What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.
This was even a major hurdle for Google Fiber. The incumbent ISPs did everything they could to obstruct them from installing fiber, and it was fairly effective even against someone with deep pockets like Google.
Looks like they're somewhat rural which probably makes it way easier. I was a project manager for a Telco years ago and the process to get fiber run in an established city is crazy. Had no idea how much was going on under the roads until I had to plan out conduit boring projects.
It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit.
Pro poles / open air:
- very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania.
- easy to get access when you need to do maintenance
Con poles / open air:
- it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it.
- it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure
Pro trench digging:
- it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.
- it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards
Cons trench digging:
- it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare
- you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench
- when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault.
- in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV...
There's a huge downside to poles where I'm based: permit shenanigans by pole owners that delay projects and allow incumbents to destroy competitors. Granted, some municipalities do the same thing. One local municipality I have to deal with responds to permit requests almost instantly, while another takes weeks of pestering to acknowledge even the most basic of permit requests.
For anyone starting out today, I would strongly recommend having a planned legal / regulatory strategy to fall back on in the event that excessive delays occur by parties you cannot avoid dealing with.
those days it's not trench digging (unless it's next to highway with machine that in one pass will trench and lay conduit/cable), it's trench drilling with something like this https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills/
frontier installed fiber in my area using this method. relatively quick and no damage that needs to be "aggressively" paved over.
I am in a rural area of Texas and I just recently got access to fiber. The other competition is ADSL and DOCSIS providers - AT&T and Optimum.
Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water main break they caused last week.
These FTTP providers have the game solved in Texas. I've seen them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live in the woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the electricity, and they're actively working on that in some areas now.
Texas regulations are quite something. My friend told me that the closest thing to regulation and zoning they have is... an HOA. This was the first time in my life I heard anything positive about HOAs.
Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north.
AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…
Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.
Unfortunately Sonic does not cover the whole bay, and certainly not all SF. I am still waiting for Sonic to cover the heart of the City (Eureka Valley).
Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed, and customer service is much better.
I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being like. What's the breakdown for actual ISP issues vs issues with customer equipment?
My experience from almost a decade ago, mostly in DSL land, is that most customer calls were "my WiFi doesn't reach through the solid steel wall the router is hung against" and "how do I set up my email" and maybe "I lost the password to my WiFi again". WiFi issues were especially bad when 802.11n got finalised but there were tons of "draft n" WiFi devices out there that almost followed the WiFi spec. I still shudder when I see Atheros listed in device manager.
There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters.
I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves.
Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.
I quite enjoyed "I run a massive home business and require 24/7 uptime and will get extremely aggressive about this"
"Maam, if your business is that important, surely you as a responsible business owner have gone and purchased a business class internet service with 24/7 SLA. It says here, you are on our cheapest, residential VDSL service"
Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at least, their support is capable of fully managing your router and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve direct customer needs such as a non-optional guest WiFi access point that any other comcast user can use).
This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)
> This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes
For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk, that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset. These might have been the majority of cases.
other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand how the rest of those are blockers.
I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.
ISPs are weird: You don’t call the water department if your sink is backed up—you call a plumber. You also don’t call the electric company when you want to wire your finished basement—you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why isn’t “home internet plumber” a thing?
Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of the water company's tap with no plumbing.
After fixing internet for some neighbors and older relatives, I've wondered if people would pay for a home network / internet handyman service. It's super frustrating, especially for older folks. They often confuse their email passwords, ISP passwords, wifi setup, etc. Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP.
I don’t understand what you mean. If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in more places, or access points mounted, you don’t call your ISP.
You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work.
The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.
Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever they have an existing business relationship with for issues related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it isn't illogical.
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
There are times when you're better off calling the local sewer department first.
In San Jose, if you see evidence that your house's main drain has backed up and you have a cleanout within 5' of the sidewalk, you're better off calling the city first before calling a plumber -- the sewer department will snake the "lateral" pipe between the cleanout and the main sewer line under the street for free.
The one time we used this the response time was very quick (in line with the 30 minute response time they cite on their website).
Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels. Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes. Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT.
With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
Right now device manufacturers are capturing the sliver of the market that actually cares about having fast Wi-Fi. A few ISPs have partnered with these manufacturers through the time honored business model of charging $10-20/mo forever on a box that costs $200.
My electricity and water is much more reliable than my Internet service. Then again, I've never called my ISP about an issue that wasn't 100% on them, but the HN crowd is more exceptional in that sense than most people.
In my experience with small ISP's they make 99% of their own headaches, the last 1% being provided by the small consultants who work with small ISP.
For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options.
I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre.
70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related.
They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade.
Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.
I'd imagine it's a lot less than "Okay, let's start by going into your dialer settings..."
With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out.
On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on.
Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...
I am always baffled by these things. Say there’s a huge company with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is “How did they get that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who must surely have had the idea to compete with them?” But no, these stories are always treating “Hey, let’s start a competing company!” like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of before, and that success is assured.
There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month.
But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic "... and the little guy wins!" spin. Ars is writing for an audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP's.
The capital for an ISP is surprisingly low. The main problem is getting a physical connection to your customer's house. And that's such an obvious legal minefield that no networking nerd wants to do it.
In the specific case of ISPs I think it's always because you won't make enough money to justify it as a big company, yet the task is too big and complicated to do it as an individual nerd.
The worst part appears to be the physical wiring. If your government has implemented loop unbundling, you're already set (probably need to do some bureaucracy and pay some affordable-at-a-stretch fees to get access to it). Otherwise, or if the loops are just crap, you have to figure out how to physically get a cable to everywhere, a task that is fundamentally laborious and legally fraught, not nerdy at all (unless lawyers are nerds) so nobody wants to do it.
Wireless ISPs are about as popular because of this. Wireless service is always worse, but you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure) at the customer's house and one central location, not all the places leading up to the customer's house. This makes it a whole lot more amenable to individual-nerd or handful-of-nerds setup.
I encourage everyone to at least think about how they would do it.
> ...you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure) at the customer's house and one central location, not all the places leading up to the customer's house.
In a rural environment, yeah, sure. Based on what I'm seeing in San Francisco, in an urban environment, you're going to be negotiating for roof space for many transceivers on many separate roofs. (I do absolutely agree that even that annoying tasks is certainly way less work than dealing with a local or state government that wants it to be impossible to run fiber through or along streets and sidewalks.)
Look, wireless service is almost guaranteed to be worse, but that has more to do with dodgy operators. The technology is fantastic, and when engineered correctly largely undetectable.
That said, in my time, I can count on one hand the number of installations where I was allowed to engineer the service correctly. And I can count on all the hands in a small city the number of times I have been called to rescue something extremely stupid, like shooting a link across a construction site.
Telephone and cable TV companies were explicitly envisioned as regulated monopolies in most places. Then it was cheaper for them to provide Internet over their existing lines than for a new company to come in.
I didn't think I've ever seen mention of a buyout in these articles. That could be something. Franchised ISP. Maybe Comcast is incapable of servicing an area effectively, so they could say something like "we'll give you x gbps of guaranteed throughout at the datacenter (or however it works) to our main line and teach you how to setup, you cover installation and maintenance". Just because it seems like it would've been easier for these guys to do only the installation and routine maintenance. But idk I guess they don't want to because they make their money anyway
So glad to see a renewed emphasis on proper wired infrastructure. It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas, I assume because it's less capital intensive.
Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to have their stuff together...
Readit News
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with the no IPv6 in 2025?
I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there something systematic here?
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
However I still applaud these guys. There needs to be more competition.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
Correct. It was a very calculated decision. They were squeezing out profits by trying to move heavy users to the next tier of service. But this only works if they have a monopoly.
So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
Everyone here that has started a company to challenge the entrenched monopoly raise your hands please.
I understand the tech deeply and that does not translate to the practical needs of trying to run a successful business.
I raise a toast to these guys. Well done.
From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
> Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
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This article couldn't have passed through my inbox more than 6 weeks or so ago so it is a very recent change.
This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.
Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.
What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.
Pro poles / open air:
- very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania.
- easy to get access when you need to do maintenance
Con poles / open air:
- it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it.
- it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure
Pro trench digging:
- it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.
- it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards
Cons trench digging:
- it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare
- you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench
- when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault.
- in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV...
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shoo...
[2] https://ucs.net/node/513
For anyone starting out today, I would strongly recommend having a planned legal / regulatory strategy to fall back on in the event that excessive delays occur by parties you cannot avoid dealing with.
when i got this far I literally thought you were making a joke about Poland.
Manufacturers should print on the sleeve "fibre optic only. no copper". :)
> [Buried pros:] Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.
Except for that one old lady who took the country of Armenia off the air:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman...
frontier installed fiber in my area using this method. relatively quick and no damage that needs to be "aggressively" paved over.
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Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water main break they caused last week.
These FTTP providers have the game solved in Texas. I've seen them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live in the woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the electricity, and they're actively working on that in some areas now.
Texas regulations are quite something. My friend told me that the closest thing to regulation and zoning they have is... an HOA. This was the first time in my life I heard anything positive about HOAs.
AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…
I have been a customer for 14 years now. Would love to move to higher bandwidth.
I recently moved into Menlo Park and had no problems getting 2.5Gbps from ATT fiber.
There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters.
I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves.
Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.
"Maam, if your business is that important, surely you as a responsible business owner have gone and purchased a business class internet service with 24/7 SLA. It says here, you are on our cheapest, residential VDSL service"
This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)
I usually speedrun this by telling them something like: I am hardwired to the modem and seeing T4s in the log.
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...
https://xkcd.com/806/
For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.
You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work.
The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
In San Jose, if you see evidence that your house's main drain has backed up and you have a cleanout within 5' of the sidewalk, you're better off calling the city first before calling a plumber -- the sewer department will snake the "lateral" pipe between the cleanout and the main sewer line under the street for free.
The one time we used this the response time was very quick (in line with the 30 minute response time they cite on their website).
With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
For fiber customer side issues are almost all wifi related, to the point that some operators will offer in home managed wireless options.
I used to provide support in an area where a provider had purchased a VDSL network in order to convert those customers to fiber. 20% of customers remained on VDSL for various reasons. 10% of customers had been moved to a dodgy hybrid fibre/last mile ethernet solution. and the remainder were all on fibre.
70% of support issues related to the VDSL customers. 20% the ethernet customers. and the remainder of issues were almost all wifi or power related.
They had a policy of charging customers 1000 bucks or so to convert them over to Fibre. Eventually they sold the business to a larger entity. 4 weeks of VDSL complaints, and the new owners gave everyone remaining on copper a free fibre upgrade.
Actually it was only technically VDSL. What they did was drop a fibre ntd into the old vdsl node, commission each port for a different customer, and then run a Ethernet / VDSL converter over the old lead in. The "upgrade" was just using the copper as a draw wire for the fibre cable. Nothing over 100 meters.
With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out.
On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on.
Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...
There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month.
But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic "... and the little guy wins!" spin. Ars is writing for an audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP's.
The worst part appears to be the physical wiring. If your government has implemented loop unbundling, you're already set (probably need to do some bureaucracy and pay some affordable-at-a-stretch fees to get access to it). Otherwise, or if the loops are just crap, you have to figure out how to physically get a cable to everywhere, a task that is fundamentally laborious and legally fraught, not nerdy at all (unless lawyers are nerds) so nobody wants to do it.
Wireless ISPs are about as popular because of this. Wireless service is always worse, but you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure) at the customer's house and one central location, not all the places leading up to the customer's house. This makes it a whole lot more amenable to individual-nerd or handful-of-nerds setup.
I encourage everyone to at least think about how they would do it.
In a rural environment, yeah, sure. Based on what I'm seeing in San Francisco, in an urban environment, you're going to be negotiating for roof space for many transceivers on many separate roofs. (I do absolutely agree that even that annoying tasks is certainly way less work than dealing with a local or state government that wants it to be impossible to run fiber through or along streets and sidewalks.)
Look, wireless service is almost guaranteed to be worse, but that has more to do with dodgy operators. The technology is fantastic, and when engineered correctly largely undetectable.
That said, in my time, I can count on one hand the number of installations where I was allowed to engineer the service correctly. And I can count on all the hands in a small city the number of times I have been called to rescue something extremely stupid, like shooting a link across a construction site.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
2020 NANOG:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo
Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to have their stuff together...
Those are all telecom providers. It makes sense that they'd love wireless because they already have cellular infrastructure.