chrishacken (u/chrishacken)

chrishacken commented on Getting Fiber to My Town [video] youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJg... · Posted by u/janvdberg

interrupt_ · 5 years ago

Here in my 3rd world country, fiber is getting pretty common. Small ISPs just rent space on poles and lay the fiber to the extend that I can choose from 4 different fiber ISPs in my home.

It amazes me how difficult it seems to get the same in more developed places like US/Canada.

chrishacken · 5 years ago

It’s this way because of how regulated everything is. You have to jump through hoops to get permission to do anything here in the U.S. in other countries you just do it.

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

pyryt · 5 years ago

There's probably a good explanation, but let me ask the question: why do we need to have men cutting hard road surfaces?

If a city extends their subway network, they dont demolish all buildings on top, lay the tracks, and then rebuild. They do it without any major interference to the surface. Similarly for mountain tunnels, you dont start by demolishing a mile of rock. We just dig the tunnel.

Couldn't someone invent a robot to dig fibre tunnels? Then we wouldnt need to bother any shop owners or neighbours with noise and inconvenience?

chrishacken · 5 years ago

How do you plan for these things to get into buildings? Sewer, water, and power utilities are anywhere from 20’ deep to 2’ deep, so unless you want these robots aimlessly digging into utilities, you still need to disturb the ground above. Subway tunnels are generally very deep... 40’+ And verrrrry expensive.

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

radicaldreamer · 5 years ago

In San Francisco, everyone along streets with underground utilities are denied fiber due to Public Works disallowing microtrenching.

Additionally, AT&T has not upgraded their lines in these areas, so we're stuck with Comcast or DSL...

chrishacken · 5 years ago

To be fair, microtrenching sucks. It’s extremely difficult to dig around lines that have even micro trenched without damaging them. Our “micro trenches” are still 16” deep, but we stopped doing that. Our new stuff is a minimum of 24”, generally 36” deep. I know people who were doing it between 4-8” and I think that’s just plain stupid.

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

monocasa · 5 years ago

Well, they don't need to build out conduits + fiber, only fiber since the idea is encourage their monopoly over the last mile. They just need to do what is happening today on the private side and run a fiber (which is cheaper for each individual player). Then encouraging everything other than the last mile to be private sets up all the right incentive structures as far as I can see to solve a lot of problems of broadband internet access.

You can see this model in very similar markets, where some countries run the cell network as a national utility. But your actual carriers are a large choice of companies connected to that network that differentiate on service, price, and added on features, rather than the amount of capital available for infrastructure investment.

chrishacken · 5 years ago

Well you need conduit to run fiber generally; so you would be doing both.

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

rayiner · 5 years ago

Okay but who is going to do that? My county is still working on bringing water and sewer to most places, and I’m less than 10 minutes outside Annapolis. Especially places that already have cable or fiber that was privately installed?

chrishacken · 5 years ago

Are you in Hartford County, MD by chance?

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

war1025 · 5 years ago

Here in Iowa, I see these "Ditch Witch" things [1] everywhere they do utility work. Seems like they can do pretty quick work with them.

[1] https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills

chrishacken · 5 years ago

Generally looking at around $200,000 for one of those. They work great in certain areas. If you’re doing urban work like we are they’re not so great because there’s a utility every 10 feet.

chrishacken commented on The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers chrishacken.com/the-war-o... · Posted by u/joecool1029

mjevans · 5 years ago

Making kickbacks and other freebies illegal would help, as would requiring all contracts entered into by such middle-management public records.

I recall hearing something about a former apartment complex mentioning how costly (letting an additional provider) in was for them; but I never did learn the details of _what_ was costly about that. Having said data out in the bright sunlight of public records would make planning a beneficial change to the status quo much easier.

chrishacken · 5 years ago

The problem with this is you can name a “kickback” by anything else, like “rent”, and that makes it legal.

chrishacken commented on Start Your Own ISP startyourownisp.com/... · Posted by u/_gfwu

ApolloFortyNine · 6 years ago

A WISP, at scale (50 users or more), should have a cost per user of about $10/m. You can oversell bandwidth considerably, more than most people realize. I've specifically seen an 80 customer wisp reporting their peak time is only 230mbps. This largely makes sense as you people streaming video is going to be your biggest usage, and that really only average 15mbps at the worse. A $1/mbit for ISP bandwidth should be doable in most areas, and since it's wireless your costs per user are actually rather low, given a good tower.

But WISPs do make the most sense in areas where there is no good alternative (only DSL or Dish).

chrishacken · 6 years ago

I'd love to know where you can get a fiber circuit for $500/m. (And even if you can, then you probably can't compete with whoever's selling you that circuit anyway.) When we started we haggled considerably.. (had to sign a 20 year deal) and managed to get a 2G/10G circuit for $1,500/m. (A 1G circuit would have been $1200/m)

chrishacken commented on Starting an ISP: Deploying Fiber chrishacken.com/starting-... · Posted by u/chrishacken

treis · 7 years ago

>I'm rooting for you, and like you, I had every ounce of skin in the game. My retirement, my daughters college. Everything.

>Understand that things don't always work out the way you intend. Starting over when you are my age is very hard. Consider me as a cautionary tale.

I'm pulling for him too, but I have the awful feeling that I'm reading the story of a guy blowing his savings, ruining his credit, and maybe taking mom down with him.

chrishacken · 7 years ago

We're a profitable company doing over a quarter million a year ATM. We aren't running fiber on a whim.