Comment by woah
3 years ago
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?