Comment by Nick-W
4 days ago
Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network
4 days ago
Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network
Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular.
(Huge kudos for this project in general)
Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...
That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.
This page was 9 seconds of white screen before the entire thing loaded at once. I'm on Starlink. Hopefully you get a chance to correct this in the future, as I'm really supportive of projects like yours, but if the page was linked from a top-5 article or something I would have hit the back button already.
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Yes the white page with nothing else mad me think it was broken.
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21 seconds from click to video in this old neighborhood (50 Mbps) in Europe.
(not OP)
This nerdsniped me.
10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools.
However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP.
I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing
(also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)
Frontend is full blazor w/hybrid WASM, almost zero JS, all C#. Browser DOM is controlled by the app service in realtime, I plan on using this as a basis for our subscribers to be able to do live traffic & link stats monitoring, among other things.
Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb
In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those.
I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.
You are doing God's work. Thank you. I wish more people cared about wasteful bandwidth usage.
Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr
If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D
I have metronet and it load in a seconds for me, tbf, I came across this thread post HNhug of death, so...
"Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189
It's not really the size that matters in this case, because the video is loaded after the page is completed, and in theory, ought not be slowing down the page if at all (my cursory examining of the network tab gives me a sort of confirmation).
However, what is indeed slow is the initial load, and the lack of CDN for their static assets (css etc). When the HN effect started eating their resources, these static assets are what hurt their load time the most.
Page doesn’t even load for me.
Yeah me neither from Australia. Hug of death?
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Xfinity's website is like that, it barely loads even using their service. I've had it time out several times, and had to start over, just trying to help my mom pay her bill.
I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.
Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.
> I get random cookies & care packages from people
I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.
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> In this sparsely populated rural area, "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."
Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.
What kind of transport are you using to hit 2.5Gbps without fibre at that distance?
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> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?
Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.
Water and sewer is probably well and a septic tank/leach field. The electrical service is probably at least that much though.
If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?
If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).
Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?
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My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.
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It’s really essential to fund or make it feasible for companies to fund broadband. Universal broadband should be a priority.
Rural programs are really successful, until the money runs out. Cities get screwed though — I served on a commission with my city on this topic and the only feasible competition at scale, Verizon, refused to engage unless the city allowed them to pick individual blocks to deploy, which means no servitude for underrepresented people.
Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.
My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.
This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.
Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex.
p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you
Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
Please don’t use C !
“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies”
God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.
I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.
Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost.
It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.
>The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.
That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.
What metric is “insanity” and why do you find that insane?
I am in France so not exactly in your coverage but I wanted to not that the comparison card (and the coverage one) do not work correctly.
The first information is fine (say, speed) but when I switch to latency the graph does not change (and BTW it's not readable on mobile)
Same for the coverage
Any plans to expand into JeffCo?
Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha
How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.
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That's a beautiful thing.
https://startyourownisp.com/
Useful threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com
This is yak shaving taken to factorio extremes, now shaving everyone's yak.
how can I do this for my city?
Do you have a few hundred thousand dollars lying around?
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This is what I love in HN.
Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda.
Great site.
This is really cool!
Does long-range ubiquiti just work because you’re in the mountains?
I’m down in much-flatter Columbia South Carolina. Would a similar setup even be physically feasible?
We had a company burying fiber, but their installers almost blew up a gas line during 5 o’clock traffic and it really pissed city council off.
This page is so large it causes the browser on my phone to crash the tab.
Hell yeah dude.