Comment by stevenjgarner
3 years ago
It depends on the scale - it does not have to be a major undertaking. You are right, it is a whole extra competency and a major customer support commitment, but for a lot of the entrepreneurial folk on HN quite a rewarding and accessible learning experience.
The first time I did anything like this was in late 1984 in a small town in Iowa where GTE was the local telecommunication utility. Absolutely abysmal Internet service, nothing broadband from them at the time or from the MSO (Mediacom). I found out there was a statewide optical provider with cable going through the town. I incorporated an LLC, became a utility and built out less than 2 miles of single mode fiber to interconnect some of my original software business customers at first. Our internal moto was "how hard can it be?" (more as a rebuke to GTE). We found out. The whole 24x7 public utility thing was very difficult for just a couple of guys. But it grew from there. I left after about 20 years and today it is a thriving provider.
Technology has made the whole process so much easier today. I am amazed more people do not do it. You can get a small rack-mount sheet metal pedestal with an AC power meter and an HVAC unit for under $2k. Being a utility will allow you to place that on a concrete pad or vault in the utility corridor (often without any monthly fee from the city or county). You place a few bollards around it so no one drives into it. You want to get quotes from some tier 1 providers [0]. They will help you identify the best locations to engineer an optical meet and those are the locations you run by the city/county/state utilities board or commission.
For a network engineer wanting to implement a fault tolerant network, you can place multiple pedestals at different locations on your provider's/peer's network to create a route diversified protected network.
After all, when you are buying expensive cloud based services that literally is all your cloud provider is doing ... just on a completely more massive scale. The barrier to entry is not as high as you might think. You have technology offerings like OpenStack [1], where multiple competitive vendors will also help you engineer a solution. The government also provides (financial) support [2].
The best perk is the number of parking spaces the requisite orange utility traffic cone opens up for you.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network
This is some old school stuff right here. I have a hard time believing this sort of gumption and moxy are as prevalent today.
> The best perk is the number of parking spaces the requisite orange utility traffic cone opens up for you.
That's hilarious.
In 1984, I am guessing the only use case for broadband internet was running an NNTP server?
NNTP wasn't a thing until 1986
> You can get a small rack-mount sheet metal pedestal with an AC power meter and an HVAC unit for under $2k.
Things have changed a lot and the dominant carriers are no longer willing to interconnect with small guys.
The anti-small bias now extends to the Department of Transportation in most states (which "owns" the right of way). In Washington, WSDOT has an entire set of rules for "financially small" (their term) telecoms, basically designed to prevent them from existing. They claim this is to prevent "financially small" providers from defaulting on damage they cause to the roadway ("not able to abate or correct their environmental damage").
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=wsdot%20%22financially...