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.
>"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."
is this really a valuable use of taxpayer money? sending a wireless link over a half-mile isn't that difficult, surely there's a better way to spend $60k of public money than delivering internet service to two families. especially now that starlink exists.
i'm all in favour of scrappy upstart ISPs, but this just seems wasteful.
Especially since he's burying the lede about the people he's servicing--its true 'in general' that the area is lower income, but most of the homes he's serving will be millionaires.
Washtenaw is certainly an affluent county, but not that rich. I live in another part of the county and used to work in Mauch's part of it; it's by no means mostly millionaires. I think the simplicity of the project's goal -- every household served, no exceptions -- is one of the reasons that it got off the ground.
without knowing specifics, that's kinda what i assumed. i see the same thing near where i live - the "low income rural areas" that get infrastructure subsidies is cottage country or areas with a lot of retirees who've moved to the country.
the actual low income people living in rural areas have to move to a suburb or a trailer park if their region isn't serviced by a utility, they don't get assistance like this.
If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that.
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing with obstacles is hard.
There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to do this.
It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure, both last-mile and backbone.
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well.
I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.
Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local library for everyone to use. I’m very supportive of rural people and the life they choose to live, but you are right - they should understand the drawbacks.
Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-)
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where there aren’t large pools of money from the government to get people decent Internet address.
He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY more money [0] and delivered less.
The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as infrastructure, defense, education.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
I knew a couple who did similar in Seattle. They all got gobbled up one by one, sometimes by Speakeasy, who in turn was gobbled up by others. Briefly theirs was owned by an east coast company which sucked because they had east coast tech support. If your internet went down binge watching a show at 9 pm you were done for the evening because their people were in bed.
I would not recommend doing this business with a spouse. They did not make it for many reasons, but running a 24/7 interest sped up all of their problems. Not unlike a vacation that is going poorly, but every month.
Also fuck Covad. They only had to suck less than Centurylink nėe Qwest and they couldn’t manage that.
Isn't this just called starting a business? Don't get me wrong it's very cool but this just seems like the thing people should do when there isn't enough competition in the market
Sure, at face value you're right about that, but I think the main difference is a lot of people don't get annoyed at , for example, Ford's customer service and turn around and start an auto manufacturer, and for most non-technical people I think they'd consider the two nearly equal in terms of feasibility and effort.
Not only that, but he’s providing a much higher level of service for a significantly smaller cost than ISPs that have been given billions over several decades and have yet to reach the customers he’s reaching.
My biggest fear for him is that comcast will lobby to be able to sell subscriptions on his infrastructure (because competition!), put him out of business and then screw his existing subscribers.
He did start an LLC but it's not a business in the sense that he's hiring a corporate structure around it or kicking up VC funding, or even trying to make a profit. It's admirable because how many other ISPs can you point to with this model? I can't think of any.
Most small local ISPs are like this, a labor of love, not something who’s singular purpose is to make the owners unimaginably rich. Cruzio, in Santa Cruz, and MonkeyBrainz in San Francisco come to mind.
> When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said.
The world is full of small businesses doing good work in exchange for pay. theVC bubble isn't everything.
There is a good interview on YouTube with Jared Mauch. I think it may have already been posted on Hacker News previously, but I have included the link below for anyone interested.
> "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."
I did a lot of investigation some years back hoping to start an ISP in a much more dense city where options were still limited. I had quotes from electrical companies of $25k-75k to run 2,000ft of aerial fiber on telephone poles (no drilling even!) The electrical company (who owns the poles) said that only certified installers could do it but that list was rather short and the person I spoke with didn't seem to know what that certification actually was. I wonder if this guy simply figured out how to legally do the infra layout himself.
He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue.
Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.
The actual price they are offering seems to be $55 or $79/month + ~$200 installation fee. Also missing in your calculation, is a $30/month subsidy from FCCs "Affordable Connectivity Program".
I didn't make the calculation myself, but a sub-10 year horizon for a project someone seems to do from the goodness of their heart, doesn't seem so bad.
Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).
Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!
So taxpayer dollars are necessary to make this business viable, and the product of that business is something that, realistically, everyone absolutely needs access to - certainly seems like this should not be a private business at all but a public utility. Have we ever asked this kind of question for interstate highways?
The Grant County Public Utility District in eastern Washington (and presumably PUDs elsewhere in the nation) did exactly that. They built a fiber network throughout the county (physically large but pretty sparsely-populated), although they don't provide service directly to customers--instead, a healthy number of local ISPs still exist in the area. If fiber isn't at your house yet, there are also a few WISPs, which were easy to stand up because of the fiber.
given the state of the roads and streets in most places in the usa I have very little confidence that public internet will keep up with maintenance, upgrading the equipment to the lastest speeds and standards every 5 yrs.
Commercial ISPs have issues and they should not be given local monopolies but even shitty Comcast is better today than it was yesterday. The same is not true of most of the roads in my state.
Well the US economy has boomed for the last 250 years or so and depends pretty heavily on roads and thirsty humans. Those investments seem to have given more than they took, by a very wide margin.
This is how the ISPs work as well, typically 10 years is common ROI for any neighborhood and 5-10 years for multi-family housing (apartment) runs. This is also the reason AT&T/Comcast won't run new installations to small (less than 40 residents in my experience) or rural neighborhoods since the ROI time gets longer the fewer potential customers they have.
Not that bad. A lot of utility-type businesses expect to have much longer return on investment times, the electric business is usually wanting to get 50 years of life out of a new baseload generating unit, and it might be 30 or 40 to get your investment back.
How long did it take to complete? Central London seems like high density, how many users do you have? Can you share website, I can forward to some central London folks!
Why - 30mbps download and 0.5mbps upload, it was really the upload that was crippling (think video conferencing)
What were the returns - time will tell, but I probably have the best internet in London
What do we peer into - 10Gbps of NTT, two more 1 Gbps full peering sessions, plus the LONAP internet exchange to pick up Google, Netflix, etc. Plus my wife (AS210412) peers with me (AS211289) of course.
I find it a little weird and off putting that thierprivate business is having its expansion funded by state funds for coronavirus recovery. I get that this is generally a good thing, and many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, receive government funds for developing and maintaining infrastructure. However, why is the Coronavirus recovery fund paying for this?
In this specific case there is an easy answer (mentioned in the article): Access to reasonably priced broadband internet was seen as one of the biggest, most easily addressable (with targeted government infrastructure funding) dividing lines between people that were able to easily work from home and those that experienced larger hardships during the height of the pandemic.
Remember the Hacker Manifesto: What could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons.
The physical infrastructure of cable is not expensive. The fiber itself costs nothing in bulk. Currently a pair of 1Gbps 20km rated transceivers costs <USD$20 in bulk.
The only things that make installs expensive are: (1) regulation; in particular ingrained antiquated systems of land ownership and associated regulatory capture bullshit by established monopolies; (2) switching infrastructure and associated power, land and security requirements; and (3) one-time installation process costs such as trench digging, termination box installation and cable termination.
Once installed, the cables are unlikely to fail unless aggressively attacked with digging equipment.
> Jared Mauch is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money.
> Mauch told us he provides free 250Mbps service to a church that was previously having trouble with its Comcast service.
That's interesting, he's taking money from the government and giving free internet to a religious organization? Do all "churches" get free internet or just the ones he prefers? Taxpayers are OK subsidizing a specific church based on one person's personal whim???
An atheist might reasonably do the same for churches in his service area, for P.R. and Marketing reasons.
How is this different from Bob - who (say) the township pays to mow the lawn & plow the parking lot at the township hall - deciding that he'll mow the lawn & plow the parking lot for free at some local church?
I know this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. If someone can prove he's discriminating against institutions on the basis of religion, he can be sued. Whether he takes money from the government or not doesn't matter in the slightest.
ah you're right, I had misinterpreted, thinking that he got a grant from the government for the public good, i missed that he just won a contract with them. my comment was based on my misconception that the government was subsidizing him as a public utility.
my comment is past the delete button so that's that.
This seems like a fun project to work on but what is the financial game here? Does he invest in building the network, operate at a loss and then sell to someone like Comcast? I assume building a remote fiber network that can reach 600 houses has to incur huge CapEx (way more than $2.6M right?) and at $50/mo a very long payback period.
The initial investment is paid by subscribers or financed by the government grant, both mentioned in the linked article.
The monthly income of $55 or $79 times 70 people is $3850-5530/month gross right now, which is likely not a full-time income, but with potentially 600 more customers soon, it's possible he could achieve a full-time income for himself, which many people would consider a worthy goal.
In 1994 or 1995, I used an ISP in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that was just one guy providing decent service. If there were issues, I'd call David and he'd fix them. His goal was to have good internet service--which was difficult to come by then and there--and to underwrite it by sharing it with others. I know he made a go of it for a number of years, although I'm not sure how it ended.
People in tech tend to forget that proper tech doesn't actually need 100s of engineers to keep it operational. That's the whole point of a computer. It does what you programmed it to do, and it does so automatically.
No you are incorrect. If you read the article and the original article they did in Jan 2021, the original effort was completely funded by him and his neighbors (as in they'd pay $X that will cover future monthly bills later.) This article is about how he has obtained additional government funding to supplement the efforts he was already doing on his own.
looks like he's been able to find some deals on equipment and stuff since he operates on such a small scale. I guess he can just continue as a small business indefinitely if he gets enough cash flow.
If you had a small robot that could tunnel underground and pull conduit behind it, the only thing you would need to lay fibre would be some electricity and time.
I don't understand why he doesn't use a microwave link for some of the single-endpoint long runs. (I don't doubt there was a reason; just want to know it,)
Why is the article harping so hard on the whole "government grants" bit. Where the investment is coming from is just about the least interesting bit of this story.
I live in a town of ~15k people in a Southern state, and I have symmetric gigabit. Granted, I pay ~$110/mo, but I have the option of symmetric 300Mbps for ~$50/mo. Neither plan has a data cap.
Then again, I chose my home based on the local ISPs' physical network topology. I didn't rely on their service maps, either - I physically went to their installation folks and got a copy of their maps.
$110 absolutely falls under "affordable" gigabit. If I want symmmetric gigabit, I can get it, with a Comcast business plan. But last I checked it was in the $four-figure range.
I pay around $35/mo for 100Mbps symmetric using a microwave satellite on my house's roof.
More frustrating is to chart how close you actually are to gigabyte symmetric. AT&T and Sonic has wired up large parts of the city but if they don't serve you, it's often by just a block or two, depending on where you are in the city. Rumor has it that local ISP MonkeyBrains is also getting in on the fiber game.
Yeah. A couple blocks away Sonic has wired up the entire neighborhood. I've been begging them to wire up my street for years with no luck. I used to be a customer but switched to Monkeybrains because I couldn't take dsl speeds any longer.
Monkeybrains is my favorite ISP, I currently use them. Affordable and reliable. A couple hiccups over the past few years (my internet speed was cut by 80-90% for a day or two) but resolved with a phone call. Nothing so bad as Comcast regularly becoming nigh-unusable at peak times.
2 years ago, Sonic pulled fiber in my neighborhood in the East Bay. Gigabit is $65/month (including taxes/fees + 1 unused phone line). Very happy with Sonic!
The area served is close to Ann Arbor, MI - so remember Starlink's "satellites are in random-ish orbits around the Earth, not magically hovering over areas with more potential customers" issue.
It's possible that the county is trying to get tough with Comcast here - "stop gouging our residents so badly, or we'll help a local competitor (to you) grow into a real thorn in your bottom line". Starlink isn't credible for that.
And the money is from a "State and Local Fiscal Recovery" fund that the county has access to - so spending it on Starlink would probably be a legal non-starter regardless.
great another example of abusing public taxpayer dollars to subsidize rural homes that shouldnt exist
infrastructure outside of dense towns is unsustainable with the extremely low amount in taxes rural areas pay
these people do not deserve the same standard of living as those in sustainable areas
subsidize them to move to urban areas, not their lifestyle that uses 20x the infrastructure load an urbanite does
Amerika can't keep building out the same levels of roads utilities and municipal water to rural areas as it does to cities. this standard of living does not scale. it is not sustainable.
if you don't believe me, go look at 100 year infrastructure costs once a suburb needs replacing. this is why every town in America is failing
I think it's acceptable to expect better. If we didn't, we'd probably have surface level sewer, water, fiber, cable, etc; all laying about, probably causing trip hazards. And these industries would probably lobby and set archaic and asinine rules for how the burial happens, and make you pay 10x the cost of what it really takes to use one of their approved contractors, because you're indulging in the luxury of having hidden basic-needs infrastructure.
Traditionally the solution is to have a tiny outbuilding with your electric meter, water valve (if you're on town water) and landline connection and then let the homeowner deal with the bulk of the length of the line run.
Getting electrical and water in those situations is always a town by town crap shoot because the trades are constantly lobbying to disallow it because they want more work. I assume ISPs are the same way.
There are many reasons why this isn't done and isn't a good idea. One of them is: animals will eat the cable. Another is: people will trip over the cable. Another is: eventually someone will dig the cable up with an excavator, even if the operator of the excavator is the same person who carefully laid the cable a few years earlier. I don't explain how I know that...
> Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.
You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas, sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems after storms.
Its so expensive that Comcast only made a profit of 42 Billion in 2021, while providing a lower quality of service than what a small ISP in Michigan can give you for a one time 2M in government grants.
As someone who actually was working in excavation for internet... well, some points to unpack here:
- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.
- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.
- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.
- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.
In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water mains.
The correct price in cities is $10 a month. The correct price in rural areas is $500 a month plus. But we have to average them because we insist on taxing cities to subsidise rural lifestyles...
The funny thing is I'd be totally okay paying $500/mo for good Internet service outside the city. The problem with this is that even in the city where Comcast has it's headquarters they will lie to you and then not show up at the agreed upon time scheduled 3 months in advance /and paid for/, then try to blame you for it and take no accountability. Which is exactly what Comcast did when I tried to get connected in my move last month. So, sure, organizations have Product teams that focus on pricing strategy, and part of that is amortizing capital costs to serve those customers and also averaging out the per-customer cost of service, but a bigger issue is that Comcast is just really bad at doing it's supposed job.
I wish there was a rural fiber or muni fiber project near me that I could subscribe to, and I'd happily pay 3x-4x what I pay Comcast, if I had some assurance that the person on the other end of the phone would actually keep their commitments and know what they are doing.
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).
https://ilsr.org/broadband-2/
https://muninetworks.org/
Displacing Comcast in any degree us a major service to the species.
Exactly. There are tons of smaller businesses not focused on infinitely growing that get by just fine. Especially in rural areas like these
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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.
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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.
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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.
Telcos aren't really that great of profit making machines. It's a capital intensive business that requires a lot of scale before making money.
Look at what this guy is doing. Many millions to get 600 customers paying <$100 a month.
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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.
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> 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.
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>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.
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This was during covid lockdowns, right? It wouldn't be fair for the govt to enforce a lockdown and not provide funds/grants for internet infra.
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At least our money is being spent in our country.
Rural electrification and rural landline were also subsidized, so there is some knowledge of how to build rural infra via subsidies.
He was getting that money regardless. He decided to drop it on that.
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.
There are lots of ISPs that don’t suck
FblQ00Ho
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.
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With a fiber based service he would be getting very few calls
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.
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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.
Hopefully with the government funding he can turn it into a real business.
I wouldn't be surprised to see his business pop up on HN's "Who wants to hire" thread.
A couple of fun facts about this guy:
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.
I don't know (or care) about how he got that ASN but ARIN does occasionally recycle returned 3 or 4 digit ASN's, including very recently:
The first time ARIN did this with a lot of 4-digit ASN's was 2009 and was how Netflix was able to get AS2906.
There is also a market for reselling ASN's that aren't needed anymore: https://auctions.ipv4.global (filter by ASN)
He's been a backbone guy since the the mid-1990s.
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In this case, this wasn't recycled - his is actually decades old
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.
[0]: https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/outages
Not come across this list before.
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
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Jared is not a rando who built an ISP. He is someone who forgot more about networking and running NSPs than most people know.
What is an ASN and what advantage is there to have a low number?
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".
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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.
The number doesn't matter.
It's an NFT representing early participation on the Internet.
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vanity
My university’s is number 2; is there any significance to that?
Is your university among these? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/...
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can somebody ELI5? what is this code mean? what is RFC 5575?
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.
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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.)
RFCs are Requests for Comments, which are what are considered potential standards in the technical world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments
Here's this one:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5575.html
"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 paid $18 per feet to have a private fiber optic line of 1000 feet installed
Are you saying you paid $18,000 for fiber optic installation at your house?
Yes
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You mean "foot" instead of "feet" here surely?
No he paid it twice, so it’s feet
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:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
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.
https://www.segra.com/
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.
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Not sure if it’s what the person in question did, but there’s a whole guide that pops up on here occasionally regarding building a wireless ISP.
https://startyourownisp.com/
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?
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From https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/, doesn't this site basically say connect to another ISP?
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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.
You can shoot light over SM at distances up to 200km (several important caveats at this distance) and it’s very usual to see spans of between 50-80km.
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There's "Start Your Own ISP":
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Also very much worth reading on this topic: Tubes by Andrew Blum (https://www.andrewblum.net/tubes-2)
He presented at an online nanog event. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo I did enjoy listening.
Jared has been participating in Nanog since forever. I have always looked up to him as a top-tier engineer.
is he visually impaired? I'm asking because he's presenting using slides including pictures
> 1Gbps with unlimited data for $79 a month
Wow, sign me up. Comcast, which has a monopoly on my market, charges me a few bucks more per month, for 150mbps.
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.
These ISP's have us over a barrel in the states.
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)
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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
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This is what happens when your government regulatory agencies gets captured [1] by corporate interests.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
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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.
For comparison an hour of car mechanics time is <$30 in Romania, but ~$150 in US.
> you get 1 Gbps symmetric fiber connection in most countries in Europe for under ~$30/month.
I suspect that decisionmakers in the US think that symmetric connections encourage communism.
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+
https://usinternet.com/fiber/plans-pricing/
Come to Minneapolis. 1 Gbps for $70.
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.
1Gbps is $40/mo from Sonic in the Bay Area
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.
Is he running the tower as a business?
...And they say 10x engineers are a myth.
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.
There are 10x engineers on teams. They just empower everyone
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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.
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Whoever says that never met one and isn't one of them. It's so obvious once you see it
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.
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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.
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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.
>"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."
is this really a valuable use of taxpayer money? sending a wireless link over a half-mile isn't that difficult, surely there's a better way to spend $60k of public money than delivering internet service to two families. especially now that starlink exists.
i'm all in favour of scrappy upstart ISPs, but this just seems wasteful.
You can do that with 2 Ubiquiti Nanobeams 5AC gen2's for $130 each and get a ~650Mbps link (source, I've done this a number of times!).
Especially since he's burying the lede about the people he's servicing--its true 'in general' that the area is lower income, but most of the homes he's serving will be millionaires.
Washtenaw is certainly an affluent county, but not that rich. I live in another part of the county and used to work in Mauch's part of it; it's by no means mostly millionaires. I think the simplicity of the project's goal -- every household served, no exceptions -- is one of the reasons that it got off the ground.
without knowing specifics, that's kinda what i assumed. i see the same thing near where i live - the "low income rural areas" that get infrastructure subsidies is cottage country or areas with a lot of retirees who've moved to the country.
the actual low income people living in rural areas have to move to a suburb or a trailer park if their region isn't serviced by a utility, they don't get assistance like this.
> over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served
This doesn't seem very efficient to me.
If utilities are underground, it can be pretty expensive to install anything. I have an estimate for municipal fiber that's about that much to get fiber a mile or two down the street overhead, and then about that much to go down my driveway underground 400 feet.
It's hard to justify when the local phone company is probably going to roll out fiber in the next few years without a direct charge, at least for the portion on the street. Of course, that'll probably be PPPoE, maybe asymetrical, likely limited to 1G, etc. Comcast won't even quote me to come down my driveway, even though they serve my neighbor across the street from the pole at the corner of my driveway.
Wow, have you considered buying some conduit and renting a trenching machine and giving the driveway portion a go yourself? Might be worth talking over that option with the muni fiber people. Though sounds like the overhead portion would still be $$$.
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It's funny because he said one of the houses needed 0.5 miles of cable. My jaw dropped when he said it would only be $30K for that.
I'm speaking as someone who has had a few hundred foot trenches dug in my yard for running cable. Extrapolating it to 0.5 miles would come out to a lot more than $30K.
What's the expensive part of a new fibre run? With $30k you could hire an excavator and operator for maybe 15 to 20 weeks straight, but I'm guessing the pits are expensive and dealing with obstacles is hard.
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There are fixed costs to a job. It doesn't cost much more to dig a bit longer trench. Things like needing to do horizontal boring to cross an intersection would jack up the cost though.
e.g. I used to pay ~$2k for a contractor to come to re-gravel my driveway. Now I own my own excavator and loader and dump trailer it costs me about $200 (plus my time plus equipment depreciation).
Surely with utility plans you can just use a mole? Dig a few trenches and just use a mole to go between them. No need to dig the entire length. I'm pretty sure this is what utility companies use in the Uk if they can't drag the utility through the existing duct/pipe. Imaging installing fibre to a neighbour and having to dig up every single pavement/road to do this.
You get bigger machines, which do work faster.
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It isn't, but that's the norm for all internet infrastructure, both last-mile and backbone.
Since time immemorial, the gap between the amortized cost of building it, and anyone's willingness to pay for transport or transit, has been a) huge (that is, commercially insurmountable), and b) traditionally covered by one of two means:
1. Government subsidy, or
2. Attempting to offer services at the high prices necessary to recoup the investment, consequently going bust due to low volumes, selling the infrastructure for a pittance in a fire sale, and the next owner gets to offer services for prices the market is willing to tolerate. With this approach, it merely remains to find some VCs to sucker for the build phase.
It was also possible, back in the day, to run tunnels across your peers since they would announce the IXP networks at each end into their IGP, but folks got wise to that scam.
There is a variation on (2) involving anti-trust laws during M&A but it amounts to the same thing.
Yeah seems like some sort of mix of fiber and wireless for the "last mile" would make more sense for installations like this.
Depends on the area. Wireless won't work well in the mountains, and I assume weather could affect some wireless technologies as well. I live in a mountainous area and we have a local ISP that provides fiber to our entire county. Which is weird, because I recently lived in a major city and couldn't get fiber.
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Agreed - that much money could put in a computer lab in a local library for everyone to use. I’m very supportive of rural people and the life they choose to live, but you are right - they should understand the drawbacks.
Its more than he personally was willing to pay ;-)
>Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Im guessing being a nerd working at akamai he wont be the one spending ~1-2 days on a Ditch Witch/trencher to make those. He probably wont even hire anyone to work a rental from United Rentals. He will subcontract to same company that does trenches for Comcast.
At $55/mo, he'll start making a profit in 45 years.
From the article: he had $2.6MM in help from the "American Rescue Plan's Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds".
He's being paid by the government to bring Internet access to homes in the state that aren't currently wired for it.
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You can hang your fiber on existing infrastructure like electric distribution poles. edit: If you're the electric company.
In most locations in the US any entity can hang wire on utility poles (the poles are often owned by the city, with an open access policy -- this is how CATV and PSTN wires are up there on poles, and more recently 5GUWB base stations). There are certain requirements (e.g. insurance, you have to have assets on hand to repair your cable when someone drives into a pole, you need workers who are certified to work near high tension wires, etc). Usually you can outsource that stuff, for a price, possibly to the same contracting company who does the same work for Comcast.
Friend of mine needed to run fiber across the street. They had to dig up the road. Cost was $50k. This was in a city where there aren’t large pools of money from the government to get people decent Internet address.
.....have you ever dug fiber in Michigan?
Same sentiment here. Maybe he could look into some WAN to CPE connections from the fibre terminations
To say the least, it's more about siphoning public taxes
I don't understand this sentiment. Taxes are levied to then pay for things such as infrastructure which this qualifies as. How else should this work?
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He's actually connecting hundreds of people that otherwise wouldn't have such access to fiber. The big ISPs took WAY more money [0] and delivered less.
[0] https://newnetworks.com/bookofbrokenpromises.htm
The point of taxes is to provide collective goods, such as infrastructure, defense, education.
One of the first thing the US's founders did was create the postal service, which was to provide mail service to everyone, regardless of location; it literally costs the same to mail a letter across the street as to send it to some house in Whoknowswhere, Alaska. This provides a minimum communications infrastructure.
One of the best things that were done in the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Act, which ensured that electrical service was provided to everyone, providing a minimum availability of a critical energy source.
Also essential was the initial telecommunications acts, which required providing telephone service at the same rates to all addresses. Again, providing this service universally ensures that the entire country has a baseline communications infrastructure.
This is why the telecomm companies have been aggressively stripping copper telephone wires from their system and replacing everything with fiber or coax — because the laws requiring universal service are tied to phone service and copper wires. This is why we wind up with companies like Comcast saying "F*$k-You - $50,000 for 500m of wire" to to everyone that isn't instantly profitable.
These universal service mandates are not to benefit each individual living on some remote farm or homestead, or just more remote suburbs/exurbs.
They are to benefit THE ENTIRE NATION. Everyone benefits from infrastructure, and benefits most when the infrastructure is more universal, when everyone can has power, can communicate and can transport goods.
You live in an advanced society with advanced infrastructure. When that infrastructure gets built out, perhaps notice that it is a good thing, instead of thinking of only your own petty concerns.
Or, go find someplace where there are no taxes and you get to do everything yourself (hey, if you want it done right, do it yourself, right?) - see what you can find and how well you can live with no roads, comms, power, security, etc. Report back.
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The resources of this country are to be allocated for the benefit of its citizens.
In other words, it is our money, and we can spend it on decent internet for rural areas.
Lack of internet access is disenfranchising when numerous necessary government and school services has been moved online.
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I knew a couple who did similar in Seattle. They all got gobbled up one by one, sometimes by Speakeasy, who in turn was gobbled up by others. Briefly theirs was owned by an east coast company which sucked because they had east coast tech support. If your internet went down binge watching a show at 9 pm you were done for the evening because their people were in bed.
I would not recommend doing this business with a spouse. They did not make it for many reasons, but running a 24/7 interest sped up all of their problems. Not unlike a vacation that is going poorly, but every month.
Also fuck Covad. They only had to suck less than Centurylink nėe Qwest and they couldn’t manage that.
Previous: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14-By20iTnDzpNcAPFayO...
Isn't this just called starting a business? Don't get me wrong it's very cool but this just seems like the thing people should do when there isn't enough competition in the market
Sure, at face value you're right about that, but I think the main difference is a lot of people don't get annoyed at , for example, Ford's customer service and turn around and start an auto manufacturer, and for most non-technical people I think they'd consider the two nearly equal in terms of feasibility and effort.
Not only that, but he’s providing a much higher level of service for a significantly smaller cost than ISPs that have been given billions over several decades and have yet to reach the customers he’s reaching.
My biggest fear for him is that comcast will lobby to be able to sell subscriptions on his infrastructure (because competition!), put him out of business and then screw his existing subscribers.
edit: s/provoking/providing (autocorrect)
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He did start an LLC but it's not a business in the sense that he's hiring a corporate structure around it or kicking up VC funding, or even trying to make a profit. It's admirable because how many other ISPs can you point to with this model? I can't think of any.
Most small local ISPs are like this, a labor of love, not something who’s singular purpose is to make the owners unimaginably rich. Cruzio, in Santa Cruz, and MonkeyBrainz in San Francisco come to mind.
> When the federal government money became available, the county issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking contractors to wire up addresses "that were known to be unserved or underserved based on the existing survey," he said.
The world is full of small businesses doing good work in exchange for pay. theVC bubble isn't everything.
There is a good interview on YouTube with Jared Mauch. I think it may have already been posted on Hacker News previously, but I have included the link below for anyone interested.
https://youtu.be/ASXJgvy3mEg
> "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."
I did a lot of investigation some years back hoping to start an ISP in a much more dense city where options were still limited. I had quotes from electrical companies of $25k-75k to run 2,000ft of aerial fiber on telephone poles (no drilling even!) The electrical company (who owns the poles) said that only certified installers could do it but that list was rather short and the person I spoke with didn't seem to know what that certification actually was. I wonder if this guy simply figured out how to legally do the infra layout himself.
He's getting $2.6 million to set up access to 417 homes. That works out to $6,235 per home. At $55 per month, it would take 113 months, or over 9 years just to get $2.6 million in revenue.
Horrible economics! What a crazy business to be in. No wonder grants like this are necessary.
The actual price they are offering seems to be $55 or $79/month + ~$200 installation fee. Also missing in your calculation, is a $30/month subsidy from FCCs "Affordable Connectivity Program".
I didn't make the calculation myself, but a sub-10 year horizon for a project someone seems to do from the goodness of their heart, doesn't seem so bad.
Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).
Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!
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So taxpayer dollars are necessary to make this business viable, and the product of that business is something that, realistically, everyone absolutely needs access to - certainly seems like this should not be a private business at all but a public utility. Have we ever asked this kind of question for interstate highways?
The Grant County Public Utility District in eastern Washington (and presumably PUDs elsewhere in the nation) did exactly that. They built a fiber network throughout the county (physically large but pretty sparsely-populated), although they don't provide service directly to customers--instead, a healthy number of local ISPs still exist in the area. If fiber isn't at your house yet, there are also a few WISPs, which were easy to stand up because of the fiber.
https://www.grantpud.org/getfiber
given the state of the roads and streets in most places in the usa I have very little confidence that public internet will keep up with maintenance, upgrading the equipment to the lastest speeds and standards every 5 yrs.
Commercial ISPs have issues and they should not be given local monopolies but even shitty Comcast is better today than it was yesterday. The same is not true of most of the roads in my state.
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Has a road or water line ever paid for itself?
Well the US economy has boomed for the last 250 years or so and depends pretty heavily on roads and thirsty humans. Those investments seem to have given more than they took, by a very wide margin.
This is how the ISPs work as well, typically 10 years is common ROI for any neighborhood and 5-10 years for multi-family housing (apartment) runs. This is also the reason AT&T/Comcast won't run new installations to small (less than 40 residents in my experience) or rural neighborhoods since the ROI time gets longer the fewer potential customers they have.
It’s a utility. Utilities have very stable revenues and very long payback periods. Nine years is pretty short in this context
Not that bad. A lot of utility-type businesses expect to have much longer return on investment times, the electric business is usually wanting to get 50 years of life out of a new baseload generating unit, and it might be 30 or 40 to get your investment back.
My wife did this, about 6 months of digging up roads in central London. Would recommend. AMA.
How long did it take to complete? Central London seems like high density, how many users do you have? Can you share website, I can forward to some central London folks!
Less than 12 months from incorporating a company to go live, about 6 months of that was road works.
Low hundreds of homes (so low probability that you know anyone there, and if you do they have already heard about it).
https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/company/hampstead-fibre
What kind of research did you do to achieve this? Any workshops or did you talk to other ISPs to gain knowledge?
As a fellow Londerer please please expand on this. Like, why, what were the returns, what'd you peer into?
Why - 30mbps download and 0.5mbps upload, it was really the upload that was crippling (think video conferencing)
What were the returns - time will tell, but I probably have the best internet in London
What do we peer into - 10Gbps of NTT, two more 1 Gbps full peering sessions, plus the LONAP internet exchange to pick up Google, Netflix, etc. Plus my wife (AS210412) peers with me (AS211289) of course.
How did you meet your wife with an ASN? Asking for a friend...
We were interns (software engineers) at Deutsche Bank, and unfortunately she didn’t have an ASN back then.
Also some bias shows here - surely the question should be ‘how did you meet your wife with multiple 3 ton excavators’.
Anyone else amused by the title? To me it reads as “Man […] expands to hundreds of homes.”
I suppose that's impressive too!
I find it a little weird and off putting that thierprivate business is having its expansion funded by state funds for coronavirus recovery. I get that this is generally a good thing, and many ISPs, especially the smaller ones, receive government funds for developing and maintaining infrastructure. However, why is the Coronavirus recovery fund paying for this?
In this specific case there is an easy answer (mentioned in the article): Access to reasonably priced broadband internet was seen as one of the biggest, most easily addressable (with targeted government infrastructure funding) dividing lines between people that were able to easily work from home and those that experienced larger hardships during the height of the pandemic.
Remember the Hacker Manifesto: What could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons.
The physical infrastructure of cable is not expensive. The fiber itself costs nothing in bulk. Currently a pair of 1Gbps 20km rated transceivers costs <USD$20 in bulk.
The only things that make installs expensive are: (1) regulation; in particular ingrained antiquated systems of land ownership and associated regulatory capture bullshit by established monopolies; (2) switching infrastructure and associated power, land and security requirements; and (3) one-time installation process costs such as trench digging, termination box installation and cable termination.
Once installed, the cables are unlikely to fail unless aggressively attacked with digging equipment.
Is he connecting to a backbone or to another ISP?
The "backbone" is made up of other ISPs
That's right, a backbone is made up of ISPs: individual spine pieces, or vertebrae.
> Jared Mauch is expanding with the help of $2.6 million in government money.
> Mauch told us he provides free 250Mbps service to a church that was previously having trouble with its Comcast service.
That's interesting, he's taking money from the government and giving free internet to a religious organization? Do all "churches" get free internet or just the ones he prefers? Taxpayers are OK subsidizing a specific church based on one person's personal whim???
> user: zzzeek
> about: ...I am a strong proponent of sarcasm.
So - difficult to interpret this comment.
An atheist might reasonably do the same for churches in his service area, for P.R. and Marketing reasons.
How is this different from Bob - who (say) the township pays to mow the lawn & plow the parking lot at the township hall - deciding that he'll mow the lawn & plow the parking lot for free at some local church?
I know this is a troll, but I'll respond anyway. If someone can prove he's discriminating against institutions on the basis of religion, he can be sued. Whether he takes money from the government or not doesn't matter in the slightest.
He picked a charity to help and this is your response?
He won a government contract to with specific deliverables. I'm not sure how he would have any responsibilities beyond those deliverables.
ah you're right, I had misinterpreted, thinking that he got a grant from the government for the public good, i missed that he just won a contract with them. my comment was based on my misconception that the government was subsidizing him as a public utility.
my comment is past the delete button so that's that.
This seems like a fun project to work on but what is the financial game here? Does he invest in building the network, operate at a loss and then sell to someone like Comcast? I assume building a remote fiber network that can reach 600 houses has to incur huge CapEx (way more than $2.6M right?) and at $50/mo a very long payback period.
However it works, pretty awesome project, kudos.
The initial investment is paid by subscribers or financed by the government grant, both mentioned in the linked article.
The monthly income of $55 or $79 times 70 people is $3850-5530/month gross right now, which is likely not a full-time income, but with potentially 600 more customers soon, it's possible he could achieve a full-time income for himself, which many people would consider a worthy goal.
In 1994 or 1995, I used an ISP in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that was just one guy providing decent service. If there were issues, I'd call David and he'd fix them. His goal was to have good internet service--which was difficult to come by then and there--and to underwrite it by sharing it with others. I know he made a go of it for a number of years, although I'm not sure how it ended.
If I were really rich, I would spend a gigantic amount of money for the sole purpose of fucking over Comcast.
Amen.
People in tech tend to forget that proper tech doesn't actually need 100s of engineers to keep it operational. That's the whole point of a computer. It does what you programmed it to do, and it does so automatically.
Its a misleading title. Govt 'built ISP', this guy led the effort.
No you are incorrect. If you read the article and the original article they did in Jan 2021, the original effort was completely funded by him and his neighbors (as in they'd pay $X that will cover future monthly bills later.) This article is about how he has obtained additional government funding to supplement the efforts he was already doing on his own.
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looks like he's been able to find some deals on equipment and stuff since he operates on such a small scale. I guess he can just continue as a small business indefinitely if he gets enough cash flow.
It is government subsidized. He just wanted good internet in the area.
Is there any internet in the US that isn't subsidized?
Maybe I should consider doing the same for the Mews houses in Westminster :)
If you had a small robot that could tunnel underground and pull conduit behind it, the only thing you would need to lay fibre would be some electricity and time.
I don't understand why he doesn't use a microwave link for some of the single-endpoint long runs. (I don't doubt there was a reason; just want to know it,)
Why is the article harping so hard on the whole "government grants" bit. Where the investment is coming from is just about the least interesting bit of this story.
Meanwhile I live in San Francisco and I still can’t get affordable symmetric gigabit fiber internet to my home.
That's nuts to me.
I live in a town of ~15k people in a Southern state, and I have symmetric gigabit. Granted, I pay ~$110/mo, but I have the option of symmetric 300Mbps for ~$50/mo. Neither plan has a data cap.
Then again, I chose my home based on the local ISPs' physical network topology. I didn't rely on their service maps, either - I physically went to their installation folks and got a copy of their maps.
$110 absolutely falls under "affordable" gigabit. If I want symmmetric gigabit, I can get it, with a Comcast business plan. But last I checked it was in the $four-figure range.
I pay around $35/mo for 100Mbps symmetric using a microwave satellite on my house's roof.
More frustrating is to chart how close you actually are to gigabyte symmetric. AT&T and Sonic has wired up large parts of the city but if they don't serve you, it's often by just a block or two, depending on where you are in the city. Rumor has it that local ISP MonkeyBrains is also getting in on the fiber game.
Yeah. A couple blocks away Sonic has wired up the entire neighborhood. I've been begging them to wire up my street for years with no luck. I used to be a customer but switched to Monkeybrains because I couldn't take dsl speeds any longer.
Monkeybrains is my favorite ISP, I currently use them. Affordable and reliable. A couple hiccups over the past few years (my internet speed was cut by 80-90% for a day or two) but resolved with a phone call. Nothing so bad as Comcast regularly becoming nigh-unusable at peak times.
2 years ago, Sonic pulled fiber in my neighborhood in the East Bay. Gigabit is $65/month (including taxes/fees + 1 unused phone line). Very happy with Sonic!
Average cost of ~ $40k per connection to the government. How is this better than Starlink?
The area served is close to Ann Arbor, MI - so remember Starlink's "satellites are in random-ish orbits around the Earth, not magically hovering over areas with more potential customers" issue.
It's possible that the county is trying to get tough with Comcast here - "stop gouging our residents so badly, or we'll help a local competitor (to you) grow into a real thorn in your bottom line". Starlink isn't credible for that.
And the money is from a "State and Local Fiscal Recovery" fund that the county has access to - so spending it on Starlink would probably be a legal non-starter regardless.
Love all these underdog stories
great another example of abusing public taxpayer dollars to subsidize rural homes that shouldnt exist
infrastructure outside of dense towns is unsustainable with the extremely low amount in taxes rural areas pay
these people do not deserve the same standard of living as those in sustainable areas
subsidize them to move to urban areas, not their lifestyle that uses 20x the infrastructure load an urbanite does
Amerika can't keep building out the same levels of roads utilities and municipal water to rural areas as it does to cities. this standard of living does not scale. it is not sustainable.
if you don't believe me, go look at 100 year infrastructure costs once a suburb needs replacing. this is why every town in America is failing
Crazy idea, but why can't we just buy some armored cable and let it lie on the ground? People can bury it themselves if it really bothers them.
A lot of these people dont seem rich enough to justify caring about it being pretty...
I think it's acceptable to expect better. If we didn't, we'd probably have surface level sewer, water, fiber, cable, etc; all laying about, probably causing trip hazards. And these industries would probably lobby and set archaic and asinine rules for how the burial happens, and make you pay 10x the cost of what it really takes to use one of their approved contractors, because you're indulging in the luxury of having hidden basic-needs infrastructure.
Traditionally the solution is to have a tiny outbuilding with your electric meter, water valve (if you're on town water) and landline connection and then let the homeowner deal with the bulk of the length of the line run.
Getting electrical and water in those situations is always a town by town crap shoot because the trades are constantly lobbying to disallow it because they want more work. I assume ISPs are the same way.
There are many reasons why this isn't done and isn't a good idea. One of them is: animals will eat the cable. Another is: people will trip over the cable. Another is: eventually someone will dig the cable up with an excavator, even if the operator of the excavator is the same person who carefully laid the cable a few years earlier. I don't explain how I know that...
> Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.
Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.
You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas, sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems after storms.
And people want this all for $55/month!
Its so expensive that Comcast only made a profit of 42 Billion in 2021, while providing a lower quality of service than what a small ISP in Michigan can give you for a one time 2M in government grants.
The little guy in Michigan also doesn't own the NBC broadcasting network, theme parks... Comcast didn't make $42B off it's cable subscribers.
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> Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.
There are two homes that are a half mile away from the others. The $30k number relates to those two properties.
As someone who actually was working in excavation for internet... well, some points to unpack here:
- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.
- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.
- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.
- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.
In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water mains.
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The correct price in cities is $10 a month. The correct price in rural areas is $500 a month plus. But we have to average them because we insist on taxing cities to subsidise rural lifestyles...
The funny thing is I'd be totally okay paying $500/mo for good Internet service outside the city. The problem with this is that even in the city where Comcast has it's headquarters they will lie to you and then not show up at the agreed upon time scheduled 3 months in advance /and paid for/, then try to blame you for it and take no accountability. Which is exactly what Comcast did when I tried to get connected in my move last month. So, sure, organizations have Product teams that focus on pricing strategy, and part of that is amortizing capital costs to serve those customers and also averaging out the per-customer cost of service, but a bigger issue is that Comcast is just really bad at doing it's supposed job.
I wish there was a rural fiber or muni fiber project near me that I could subscribe to, and I'd happily pay 3x-4x what I pay Comcast, if I had some assurance that the person on the other end of the phone would actually keep their commitments and know what they are doing.
If I could get at actual good speed instead of being limited to 6/1 I would have no issue paying $500. I get a ton of value from the internet.
The corn has to be grown somewhere.
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Us vs them is not cool. Every lifestyle has value.
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