[HN Gopher] Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their ow...
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Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP
Author : LorenDB
Score : 251 points
Date : 2025-07-14 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ipython wrote:
| So glad to see a renewed emphasis on proper wired infrastructure.
| It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily
| pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas, I assume
| because it's less capital intensive.
|
| Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to
| have their stuff together...
| LoganDark wrote:
| > It seems the "big boys" (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc) are heavily
| pushing wireless and not building out new wired areas
|
| Those are all telecom providers. It makes sense that they'd
| love wireless because they already have cellular
| infrastructure.
| kube-system wrote:
| I've seen a few articles about folks who started an ISP and they
| always talk about the physical infrastructure. But in today's
| world where ISP ads are touting the speeds of their wifi, it
| really makes me wonder what the support burden ends up being
| like. What's the breakdown for _actual_ ISP issues vs issues with
| customer equipment?
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is 10 years out, but I used to work on an IT help desk,
| that was the outsourced 24/7 helpdesk / hosting for a
| collection of small local/regional isps (<5000 customer rural
| dsl companies, local municipalities, apartments, etc) My
| ballpark estimate from that over 3 years working there is
| probably 75%+ are Not equipment related. Setting up email was a
| big one, people accidentally hitting the input/source button on
| their remote and losing their STB input setting, People needing
| to reboot their router, flushing DNS settings / winsock reset.
| These might have been the majority of cases.
| no_wizard wrote:
| other than flushing DNS / winsock resets, I don't understand
| how the rest of those are blockers.
|
| I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the
| general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe
| most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of
| things.
| kube-system wrote:
| Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Even if 99.9% of
| Comcast customers are pretty good with technology, and only
| 1 in 1000 customers are illiterate enough that they have
| trouble selecting the correct input on their TV... with 32
| million customers, that means you might get tens of
| thousands of calls about it.
|
| But really, internet (and digital TV) services are
| pervasive enough that they are no longer just for
| technologically inclined and resourceful people. All
| aspects of society are now using the internet, even the
| homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.
| mindslight wrote:
| I'd imagine it's a lot less than "Okay, let's start by going
| into your dialer settings..."
|
| With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the
| GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will
| just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet
| interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and
| have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its
| probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions
| and just have a tech stop by to check it out.
|
| On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to
| self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the
| ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware
| that if a device works good close to the router, and not good
| far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP,
| you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does
| not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP
| about. And so on.
|
| Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech
| support in a few decades...
| boredtofears wrote:
| Which is why comcast goes to such great lengths to ensure they
| own as much of your network stack as they can - in my area at
| least, their support is capable of fully managing your router
| and WiFi remotely if you're leasing their equipment. I imagine
| this is a great boon for their ability to provide tech support
| (and includes a host of other "features" that don't serve
| direct customer needs such as a non-optional guest WiFi access
| point that any other comcast user can use).
|
| This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own
| equipment where you're basically proving to the support
| underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first
| 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the
| modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm
| testing on a wired connection, etc)
| mindslight wrote:
| > _This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own
| equipment where you 're basically proving to the support
| underling that you know how to run your equipment for the
| first 20-30 minutes_
|
| For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question
| here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech
| support for a non-working connection - and that falls
| squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Comcast killed my Internet during an interview video call.
|
| Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned
| outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.
| mindslight wrote:
| Exactly. That's the kind of logic that only makes sense
| in a metastasized corpo. The only times my non-incumbent
| fiber connection has gone down in 8 years have been
| overnight maintenance windows that only happen maybe a
| few times per year.
| massysett wrote:
| The guest wifi - Xfinity WiFi - can be disabled.
|
| https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-
| wif...
| boredtofears wrote:
| Last I checked (years ago) it turned itself back on any
| time the router was power cycled.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I know for a while (I switched back to consumer a few
| years ago) Comcast Business let you persistently opt out,
| but if you opted out, you couldn't use other people's APs
| (either "share and get access to that network" or "don't
| share, and don't").
|
| Now I just use my own customer modem.
| teeray wrote:
| > proving to the support underling that you know how to run
| your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes
|
| I usually speedrun this by telling them something like: I am
| hardwired to the modem and seeing T4s in the log.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Great. Glad to hear you are connected via hard wire Mr.
| teeray.
|
| > Please wait a moment while I check on some things on your
| account.
|
| > Thank you for your patience. Can you please confirm for
| me that you see a green light on the top of the device? Can
| you tell me whether the light is blinking or is solid?
| kayge wrote:
| If only 'shibboleet' had caught on -.-
|
| https://xkcd.com/806/
| simoncion wrote:
| Back when Comcast made it absolutely mandatory to have a
| technician come to the house to do the install, I just
| chatted with the tech about computer networking and our
| respective home setups. This usually got me the phone
| number for the local tech support office along with a "Call
| this if the service is giving you any _real_ issues. ".
| jeroenhd wrote:
| My experience from almost a decade ago, mostly in DSL land, is
| that most customer calls were "my WiFi doesn't reach through
| the solid steel wall the router is hung against" and "how do I
| set up my email" and maybe "I lost the password to my WiFi
| again". WiFi issues were especially bad when 802.11n got
| finalised but there were tons of "draft n" WiFi devices out
| there that _almost_ followed the WiFi spec. I still shudder
| when I see Atheros listed in device manager.
|
| There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of
| them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers
| hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time
| helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install
| plugs and adapters.
|
| I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my
| email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't
| work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they
| try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is
| broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or
| design as well, those usually came in waves.
|
| Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet
| services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the
| occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a
| relatively low call volume compared to what customers call
| about.
| teeray wrote:
| ISPs are weird: You don't call the water department if your
| sink is backed up--you call a plumber. You also don't call the
| electric company when you want to wire your finished basement--
| you hire an electrician. ISPs somehow became responsible for
| absolutely every aspect of consuming their service though. Why
| isn't "home internet plumber" a thing?
| dmonitor wrote:
| Most people don't have the equivalent of home internet
| plumbing in general. They have a hole drilled into the wall
| (by the ISP) where the all-in-one modem-router-switch-wap
| sits on a shelf. There's probably a third party service to
| get ethernet run through your walls, and maybe even replace
| your all-in-one box with something good, but most people are
| just doing the equivalent of getting water straight out of
| the water company's tap with no plumbing.
| pintxo wrote:
| Nice analogy!
| MostlyStable wrote:
| This, and also, it's much more common for internet problems
| to be caused by upstream issues not in the house (partly
| because of the situation you describe....not much to go
| wrong on the users end). It's very rare that a plumbing
| problem is because the main water line lost pressure.
|
| Back when I still had ISPs that provided the modem +
| router, every single issue I think I ever had fell into one
| of two categories: a modem and/or router power cycle fixed
| it, or it was a broader network issue that had nothing to
| do with me or my particular internet situation (this is
| omitting the most common third issue: terrible customer
| service problems, but that's a separate thing)
| kube-system wrote:
| Having worked with the public before, I have no doubt that a
| lot of people likely do contact utility companies for issues
| inside their home. Some of them even do have repair programs
| with outside contractors. People often simply call whoever
| they have an existing business relationship with for issues
| related to that product/service. It may be ignorant but it
| isn't illogical.
|
| Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't
| terminate their service at the edge of your premises.
| Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices
| to confirm installation.
| icedchai wrote:
| After fixing internet for some neighbors and older relatives,
| I've wondered if people would pay for a home network /
| internet handyman service. It's super frustrating, especially
| for older folks. They often confuse their email passwords,
| ISP passwords, wifi setup, etc. Also I could save them a
| bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like
| moving their landlines to VOIP.
| freedomben wrote:
| I had the same thought, and even took on a few "customers"
| (local folks I didn't charge, but used as a test group). If
| I decide to do it "for real" I will definitely need to
| build a relationship with a person who can run ethernet
| cables through walls for people. I can do that, but the
| time it would take would not make it worth it for me.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of
| services they don't use, like moving their landlines to
| VOIP.
|
| If you want a landline to call emergency services, I'd
| expect a real landline will have higher uptime than one
| that depends on your router.
| kube-system wrote:
| VoIP doesn't necessarily require your router to be up.
|
| For example, if you subscribe to Verizon FiOS voice, the
| technician will disconnect your copper phone lines and
| connect them to VoIP termination on your ONT.
| icedchai wrote:
| This is true, but it's not just that. How many useless
| cable TV packages are people paying for, on top of
| Netflix, Hulu, and tons of other streaming services?
| tptacek wrote:
| For the same reason you called the phone company when your
| phone went out, not a phone plumber.
| akerl_ wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean. If you want Ethernet run
| through your house, or coax in more places, or access points
| mounted, you don't call your ISP.
|
| You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell
| them you have some low voltage work.
|
| The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the
| same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your
| wall.
| kube-system wrote:
| > If you want Ethernet run through your house, or coax in
| more places, or access points mounted, you don't call your
| ISP.
|
| In the US, most do. This is a standard part of "in home
| installation" when first subscribing to service for all of
| the major providers in the US.
|
| Example: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-
| service/sc...
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| There are times when you're better off calling the local
| sewer department first.
|
| In San Jose, if you see evidence that your house's main drain
| has backed up and you have a cleanout within 5' of the
| sidewalk, you're better off calling the city first before
| calling a plumber -- the sewer department will snake the
| "lateral" pipe between the cleanout and the main sewer line
| under the street for free.
|
| The one time we used this the response time was very quick
| (in line with the 30 minute response time they cite on their
| website).
| bcrl wrote:
| Fibre is orders of magnitude better than DSL or cable as entire
| classes of problems are eliminated. Water shorting out copper
| pairs? Not a problem unless the water gets inside a splice and
| freezes causing significant bends that lower signal levels.
| Water getting into a cable is generally not an issue as most
| cables are either gell filled or have water blocking tapes.
| Lightning strikes are generally a non-issue since the cable
| isn't going to conduct a damaging charge into the ONU/ONT.
|
| With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence
| of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer
| issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support
| headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part
| of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest
| even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks
| that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking
| ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving
| up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
| adambatkin wrote:
| My electricity and water is much more reliable than my Internet
| service. Then again, I've never called my ISP about an issue
| that wasn't 100% on them, but the HN crowd is more exceptional
| in that sense than most people.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Congrats! I grew up just down the road from Saline. Exciting to
| see this happening on my old stomping grounds. Best of luck.
| throw0101b wrote:
| A presentation from 2020 NLNOG by Jared Mauch who did something
| similar in Michigan community:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
|
| 2020 NANOG:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo
| Rooster61 wrote:
| I once lived in a town with local high speed (although it was
| cable, not fiber). It really does make a world of difference in
| terms of what you pay and what kind of support you get.
|
| It's disgusting that big telecom has been able to monopolize so
| much of the US for so long.
| yalok wrote:
| Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts
| of it don't have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does
| provide some in the north.
|
| AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due
| to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then
| never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due
| to complications with cities)...
| Cerium wrote:
| Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and
| Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and
| have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed,
| and customer service is much better.
| mosdl wrote:
| Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!
| Cerium wrote:
| Thanks for saying so - I got a flyer and didn't realize
| they are local.
| mayli wrote:
| I am on it, still a little bit pricer than Comcast, but
| worth every penny.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they
| lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that
| actually works, great service.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance but what is the benefit to ipv6 for
| local, consumer internet?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| For regular folks there isn't much benefit tbh. Mainly I
| think it simplifies ISP architecture and offers slightly
| faster (like 10%) performance but ISPs have to support IPv4
| stack for foreseeable future anyway so kinda moot point. If
| you game a lot p2p (i don't) you should, in theory, see
| lower lag.
|
| For me personally, I work on networking startup so I'd like
| to be able to run IPv6 stack from my home network to test
| things.
| simoncion wrote:
| If you don't currently have IPv6 service, have you looked
| into something like Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnel
| broker? [0] It's how I got my first IPv6 subnet, and
| worked really well for me. I stopped using it when
| Comcast finally got around to providing IPv6 for non-
| business accounts.
|
| [0] https://tunnelbroker.net/
| frollogaston wrote:
| Most video games don't work with ipv6 at all, which is
| ironic since in theory they're the exact use case for it
| simoncion wrote:
| The big customer-visible feature is that every machine on
| their LAN _can_ be globally reachable. For ISPs that
| absolutely cannot get enough IPv4 space to give their
| customers even a single globally-reachable IPv4 address,
| this would be the only way to get any global IP space. IME,
| edge routers that are intended for networking noobs to use
| often set up their firewalls so that they block inbound
| unsolicited IPv6 traffic, but (unlike with IPv4 NAT) there
| 's the option of opening up multiple hosts to some or all
| inbound traffic.
|
| Another feature that I find to be pretty stupid (but that
| some folks seem to really like) are IPv6 "privacy"
| addresses. Because each host _usually_ is assigned an IPv6
| address in a subnet that 's 64 bits wide, most mainstream
| OS's have configured their IPv6 address autoconfigurator to
| set one stable, "permanent" address, and to set a parade of
| periodically changing "temporary" addresses. The OS is
| usually configured to prefer the permanent address when
| software asks for a socket to _listen_ on (and sockets that
| handle replies to that listen socket), and those temporary
| addresses are preferred for sockets that initiate outbound
| traffic. The idea is that this is supposed to confuse
| tracking, but I 'm very skeptical of its efficacy in the
| real world.
|
| Finally, a customer can also usually get enough IP space to
| make globally-reachable subnets on their LAN. Depending how
| the ISP has configured things, a customer can get between
| four and 256 subnets. These subnets are handy to provide
| networks that provide globally-reachable IP addresses, but
| that can be easily logically isolated from the rest of the
| LAN by the router.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Pretty much negative, I always disable it
| llsf wrote:
| Unfortunately Sonic does not cover the whole bay, and
| certainly not all SF. I am still waiting for Sonic to cover
| the heart of the City (Eureka Valley).
| rayiner wrote:
| I have two lit fiber cables to my house in exurban maryland and
| I find it hilarious that many places in the Bay Area have zero.
| manquer wrote:
| It could just be mundane technical debt or just organizational
| bureaucracy .
|
| I recently moved into Menlo Park and had no problems getting
| 2.5Gbps from ATT fiber.
| Dotnaught wrote:
| In most of San Francisco and parts of the East Bay, there's
| MonkeyBrains: https://www.monkeybrains.net/
| llsf wrote:
| Does Monkeybrains offer fiber now ?
|
| I have been a customer for 14 years now. Would love to move
| to higher bandwidth.
| teddyh wrote:
| I am always baffled by these things. Say there's a huge company
| with a monopoly in your area. My first thought is "How did they
| _get_ that monopoly? What happened to all the other people who
| must surely have had the idea to compete with them?" But no,
| these stories are always treating "Hey, let's start a competing
| company!" like some revolutionary idea that nobody has thought of
| before, and that success is assured.
| Neywiny wrote:
| I didn't think I've ever seen mention of a buyout in these
| articles. That could be something. Franchised ISP. Maybe
| Comcast is incapable of servicing an area effectively, so they
| could say something like "we'll give you x gbps of guaranteed
| throughout at the datacenter (or however it works) to our main
| line and teach you how to setup, you cover installation and
| maintenance". Just because it seems like it would've been
| easier for these guys to do only the installation and routine
| maintenance. But idk I guess they don't want to because they
| make their money anyway
| bell-cot wrote:
| > What happened to all the other...
|
| There's a _huge_ gap between "had the idea" and "had all the
| technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial
| ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and
| succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these
| guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads
| of money every month.
|
| But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are
| obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic
| "... and the little guy wins!" spin. _Ars_ is writing for an
| audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP 's.
| immibis wrote:
| The capital for an ISP is surprisingly low. The main problem
| is getting a physical connection to your customer's house.
| And that's such an obvious legal minefield that no networking
| nerd wants to do it.
| bell-cot wrote:
| The capital _can_ be low. Vs. the article notes that these
| two guys have 75 miles of fiber installed (to 1,500
| potential-customer homes) and 15 local employees. Vs.
| currently monthly revenues of about $10K.
|
| Yeah, obviously these guy's long prior experience - pulling
| fiber for other ISP's - was another critical cornerstone of
| their ability to go from idea to build-out.
| immibis wrote:
| In the specific case of ISPs I think it's always because you
| won't make enough money to justify it as a big company, yet the
| task is too big and complicated to do it as an individual nerd.
|
| The worst part appears to be the physical wiring. If your
| government has implemented loop unbundling, you're already set
| (probably need to do some bureaucracy and pay some affordable-
| at-a-stretch fees to get access to it). Otherwise, or if the
| loops are just crap, you have to figure out how to physically
| get a cable to everywhere, a task that is fundamentally
| laborious and legally fraught, not nerdy at all (unless lawyers
| are nerds) so nobody wants to do it.
|
| Wireless ISPs are about as popular because of this. Wireless
| service is always worse, _but_ you only have to install plant
| (physical infrastructure) at the customer 's house and one
| central location, not all the places leading up to the
| customer's house. This makes it a whole lot more amenable to
| individual-nerd or handful-of-nerds setup.
|
| I encourage everyone to at least think about how they would do
| it.
| simoncion wrote:
| > ...you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure)
| at the customer's house and one central location, not all the
| places leading up to the customer's house.
|
| In a rural environment, yeah, sure. Based on what I'm seeing
| in San Francisco, in an urban environment, you're going to be
| negotiating for roof space for _many_ transceivers on many
| separate roofs. (I do absolutely agree that even that
| annoying tasks is certainly way less work than dealing with a
| local or state government that wants it to be impossible to
| run fiber through or along streets and sidewalks.)
| wmf wrote:
| Telephone and cable TV companies were explicitly envisioned as
| regulated monopolies in most places. Then it was cheaper for
| them to provide Internet over their existing lines than for a
| new company to come in.
| monster_truck wrote:
| If you ever have the chance to support a local ISP like this, do
| it! You can get some pretty sweet deals, the last time I had the
| opportunity to do this they threw in a /28 for "free" (agreed to
| two year terms)
| simoncion wrote:
| When was the last time you had the opportunity to do this?
| 1998? I believe that what you're telling me is true, (and yeah,
| small ISPs are often _really_ great to be customers of because
| of stuff like that) but -given the state of IPv4 allocations- I
| find it difficult to believe that it happened within the past
| ten, twenty years.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked
| down the road.
|
| It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell
| and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's
| 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it
| seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that
| option wasn't there 6 months ago.
|
| ~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have
| put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me
| for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit
| every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can
| make it work.
| gs17 wrote:
| > Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer
| "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6
| months ago.
|
| It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought
| the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware
| came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan
| was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
| nkellenicki wrote:
| You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited
| data, however its only in the past month or two that they've
| started offering unlimited data as standard (in select
| markets).
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-
| custome...
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| I'm sorry I still don't get it. Could you explain that in
| different phrasing ?
|
| A comcast customer always had the option to pay for
| unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part?
| "Started offering it as standard" means what?
| amethyst wrote:
| In markets where Comcast has actual real competition,
| they "include" the unlimited data (aka no cap) with no
| extra charge when you sign up for their gigabit plans.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| In the Bay Area Comcast offered (2017-2023 at least)
| internet with a default 1-1.2TiB/mo data cap that you can
| lift for the month for an extra 10-20usd (I don't recall,
| my roommate who played CoD was the one paying for this by
| himself on every month with huge updates).
|
| There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much
| chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are
| just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not
| in jail.
| rcleveng wrote:
| Really 10-20 more? When I asked, and I'm in the Bay Area,
| the unlimited plan was $5 a month more than it would cost
| if I leased their modem.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| How much more was it than if you weren't leasing their
| modem?
| wijwp wrote:
| That's not true. I tried getting unlimited data like 7-8
| years ago and they said I needed a business account to get
| it.
| bayarearefugee wrote:
| What ISPs offer and how much they offer it for tends to
| vary wildly region to region.
|
| If you live in a region where they have no meaningful
| competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of
| places in the US) well bend over and lube up.
| observationist wrote:
| They'll vary wildly, as much as they think they can get
| away with, in the hopes that you will never use the
| service and pay them as much as possible for it, and
| they'll bury your mailbox with crap to try to wear you
| down into coming back.
|
| They will happily let you pay for years, for services
| that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their
| networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay
| anything back; they know they are receiving extra money,
| and there's a significant amount that comes in, but "oh,
| it's so confusing, and there are so many legacy systems,
| we can't possibly catch every mistake."
|
| The money they shuffle back and forth between each other,
| daily, reeks of book cooking - you might have a stretch
| of 20 miles of trunk in which there are 20 separate
| owners - not concurrent riding separate fiber lines, but
| in sequence, each paying rent to or getting rent paid by
| the adjacent rider, even though only a single company
| actually services the entire span.
|
| It's funny how construction companies and ISPs get these
| rackets going, and then when people come along like these
| PrimeOne guys and offer a reasonable rate on a decent
| product, it's somehow vastly disruptive and threatening.
|
| They'll expand, and be encouraged and allowed to expand,
| and after 5 or 6 years, the big ISPs will start circling,
| and eventually buy them out, and they'll retire happy.
| AT&T or Lumen will own their network inside of 10 years,
| and they'll claim it's modernized and upgraded
| infrastructure. People with shitty oversold
| undermaintained cable internet will be left alone until
| the money stops.
|
| Starlink to phones is great, if it only didn't make ISPs
| so much money handling the base stations on the ground.
|
| There's fiber all over the US just hanging there, unused,
| unmaintained, because merger after merger after merger
| left giant piles of assets under the ownership of
| companies like comcast and centurylink and at&t, who left
| infrastructure to rot, often built with public funding,
| and maintained their local monopolies and shitty service.
|
| Whatever it is we're doing to regulate the industry at a
| federal level isn't working, but I imagine that's where a
| lot of the money goes.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided
| router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
|
| This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6
| because most fiber providers don't.
|
| For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo
| to escape their cgnat.
|
| I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me
| about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they
| have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
| jerf wrote:
| "I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber
| providers don't."
|
| Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber
| and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with
| the no IPv6 in 2025?
|
| I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there
| something systematic here?
| ta8645 wrote:
| Everybody can muddle along without IPv6, so it's easy to
| make it a very low priority. Especially for small shops
| that are struggling just to create a viable business. IPv6
| needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or
| application that is only available on IPv6.
| paleotrope wrote:
| The eggs need some chickens first.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| We used to have freeipv6porn.com, lol. But I suspect that
| was a joke as much as anything else given how much porn
| you can get for free all over the Internet.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web
| destination or application that is only available on
| IPv6._
|
| How about not having to pay for (as) beefy CG-NAT
| hardware because people that go to Youtube, Netflix,
| MetaFace, TikTok, _etc_ , can directly connect via IPv6.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Thankfully, they are doing IPv6, although one day I had some
| weird issue where IPv6 was broken but if I disabled it ipv4
| was still working. Could have been my fault, IPv6 is
| generally new to me (not much of a network person).
|
| I get the impression that they are still learning to run an
| ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I
| learned more about them from this article than from actually
| being living here with them.
| bcrl wrote:
| I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my
| fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main
| reason is that any service that is not widely used will have
| gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's
| always the same handful of customers hitting problems or
| finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth
| incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if
| something goes wrong with IPv4, it's going to be noticed very
| quickly.
|
| Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I
| do not agree. There are a million different little issues
| that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world,
| and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of
| detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial
| Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points
| occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route
| filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection
| that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind
| of oddball issue that active users catch and report which
| does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
| Sanzig wrote:
| If you already have to do CGNAT, why not IPv6 as your core
| network with NAT64 at the border and 464XLAT on the CPE? It
| gives you best of both worlds.
| bcrl wrote:
| I'm not doing CGNAT. We were able to get enough IPv4
| addresses directly from ARIN a few years ago after being
| on the waiting list for a couple of years. It's a pity
| that widespread fraud depleted that pool faster than it
| should have been.
|
| CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it
| taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported
| by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still
| vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the
| IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more
| complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The
| incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access
| network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix
| delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only
| started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the
| required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware
| vendors' software development kits for their chipsets).
| Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a
| number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management
| of devices ( _cough_ Ubiquiti _cough_ ) in parts of their
| product line.
|
| That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely
| awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty
| much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport
| network is one such item that makes building transport
| networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No
| more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field
| and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just
| aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my
| fibre ISP
|
| How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a
| lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's
| just that saying there's no demand because your average
| consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking
| for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being
| implemented.
|
| On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run
| into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue,
| because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we
| do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
| bcrl wrote:
| Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of
| customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring
| their existing or own wireless routers along and
| occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable.
| Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be
| fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right
| now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no
| modern replacements -- it's just not worth spending money
| to replace them when customers are going to migrate to
| fibre soon enough.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| For me, no IPv6 = no business. I don't think it's acceptable
| to build a network on IPv4 only at this point, it speaks to
| being willing to cut corners and not do things the right way
| just because it's easier.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I agree in principal but if the only other option is
| Charter/Spectrum/Comcast, you bet I'm going with the "lazy"
| person's fiber.
|
| I have spent most of my career under the thumb of fucking
| cable and I'd sooner slam a car door on my nuts than go
| back to paying so much money for such garbage service.
| artooro wrote:
| I wish I could say no IPv6 no business. There are only 2
| ISPs here, one cable and one fiber. Neither have IPv6, the
| smaller ISP also does CGNAT because IPs are expensive. I'm
| trying to convince them that they could save money with
| less powerful CGNAT hardware if they deploy dual stack.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on
| the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4
| services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you
| only have one set of address space to manage and your
| customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6
| related.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| How would you as a customer tell if they were?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Because you'd have native IPv6
| yuvadam wrote:
| since tailscale exists, why would you care about cgnat or
| even pay to escape it?
| tjohns wrote:
| I'm not the only person connecting to my machines.
|
| Some applications want to open ports and don't have the
| server-side infrastructure to punch a hole through NAT.
| Especially P2P apps and some games.
|
| Sometimes I want to run a small, low-traffic web server
| from home.
|
| Sometimes I'm connecting to my network from a machine that
| I don't control and can't install Tailscale on.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Comcast similarly removed their 1.2TB cap in my neighborhood
| within months of us getting fiber. It's almost like the only
| reason for the cap was because they could get away with it when
| there wasn't any competition.
| xedrac wrote:
| Comcast is notorious for exploiting places that don't have
| any other real options. Just before Google Fiber was
| activated in my area, Comcast stepped up their game big time.
| The only problem is that they had spent years nickel and
| diming me for actual connection speeds that didn't even come
| close to their advertised rates, and their latency/jitter is
| garbage compared to fiber. Comcast clearly doesn't want to
| have to compete. In their defense, their connection was
| rarely down.
| some-guy wrote:
| When I lived in downtown Oakland CA, Comcast literally
| could not keep up price-wise with the competition. Their
| customer service jaw would drop when I told them our local
| fiber offered a flat fee cheaper than theirs for 10 gigabit
| symmetrical fiber. On top of that there was another local
| microwave wireless option that wasn't too terrible.
|
| The only thing in the end their salespeople could do was
| offer TV bundles but still wasn't cost-competitive. Not
| sure what their offerings are now but it was such an easy
| decision to switch.
| PantaloonFlames wrote:
| > is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any
| other real options.
|
| Isn't this standard competitive practice ? Charge what the
| market will bear.
|
| I don't know if I'd call that "exploitation". If there's
| one gas station 90 miles from every other gas station in
| the Nevada desert, they're gonna charge more, aren't they?
| xedrac wrote:
| Yes, it certainly is. But isn't it interesting that
| Comcast is almost universally hated? I used the word
| "exploit" simply because had they treated their customers
| better and focused on putting their best foot forward, I
| don't think they would have bled customers nearly as
| quickly.
| projektfu wrote:
| Feature-wise it doesn't matter because you're still going to
| have to play the price haggling game. Other providers don't
| renegotiate every 6 months like they do. They have more in
| common with Waste Management than with a respectable ISP.
| tossaway0 wrote:
| That's exactly it and they admitted it last week.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-
| custome...
| justusthane wrote:
| > their provided router is locked down to hell
|
| From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for
| the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
|
| > Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router
| if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
| eurleif wrote:
| Modem _and_ ONT? I 'm under the impression that there's
| nothing called a "modem" for fiber, and that the ONT serves a
| similar role. Am I confused?
| lstamour wrote:
| Can't speak to this exact circumstance, but more generally:
| The ONT translates the SFP+ networking to fibre optic, but
| the modem is still somewhat necessary for logins if you use
| PPPoE as a wrapper for example. In telecom fibre optic, it
| often also assigns a particular vlan to internet packets
| and separate vlans for TV and phone. But I'm not an expert
| here, just explaining why I needed a modem function in my
| router as well as a media converter to house the ONT.
|
| As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem
| and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became
| more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.
| vel0city wrote:
| I wouldn't really call that a "modem" though, it's not
| really doing modulation/demodulation work to convert
| between media types. The terminology I usually hear for
| the provider's box handling any final authentication and
| VLAN splitting is usually a "residential gateway", which
| can be configured to bridge to a client's equipment.
|
| Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| No, that's my understanding as well.
|
| My fiber installer referred to the Adtran 632V ONT he
| installed as the "modem".
|
| He installed two other junction boxes (one outside the
| house near/under where the fiber attaches to the wall of
| the house, one inside near the ONT) but they're just
| passive optical couplers allowing them to swap out fiber
| segments in the event of fiber damage without re-running
| the entire install.
| wmf wrote:
| _their provided router is locked down to hell and they 're on a
| cgnat_
|
| So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different
| way.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| It was there 6 months ago, because when I moved and had to
| switch to comcast in 2021 I found out about the cap after
| ~5TB/mo
| baby_souffle wrote:
| I vaguely remember reading something about their
| consolidating plans and simplifying pricing slightly. Part of
| that was eliminating the data cap.
|
| This article couldn't have passed through my inbox more than
| 6 weeks or so ago so it is a very recent change.
| imzadi wrote:
| I'm on the other side of the country and was a Cox customer for
| over a decade until they decided to add a data cap to their
| plans. Fortunately, wyyred rolled into town right around the
| same time, offering fiber at higher speeds, no data caps, and
| half the cost. It was an easy decision. I also noticed that Cox
| is now advertising unlimited data for free. Too little too
| late.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| _" Everything that we're doing is all underground."_
|
| This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at
| this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
|
| A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra
| deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local
| gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an
| attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
|
| more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either
| trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both
| but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This
| last adds the PSC to the mix.
|
| Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill
| infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground
| isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate.
| Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of
| regulatory capture.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Looks like they're somewhat rural which probably makes it way
| easier. I was a project manager for a Telco years ago and the
| process to get fiber run in an established city is crazy. Had
| no idea how much was going on under the roads until I had to
| plan out conduit boring projects.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's not that easy. Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff
| discussion. FWIW I was once in construction digging trenches
| and I'm German, so I might be biased a bit.
|
| Pro poles / open air:
|
| - very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how
| you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural
| ditches of Romania.
|
| - easy to get access when you need to do maintenance
|
| Con poles / open air:
|
| - it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got
| some sort of half assed fiber cable on it.
|
| - it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans:
| idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]),
| sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage
| infrastructure
|
| Pro trench digging:
|
| - it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power,
| you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal
| floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright
| submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking
| rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck
| about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so
| are cable thieves or terrorists.
|
| - it looks way better, especially when local governments go and
| re-surface the roads afterwards
|
| Cons trench digging:
|
| - it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare
|
| - you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic
| planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench
|
| - when something does happen below ground, it can be ...
| challenging to access the fault.
|
| - in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground
| can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that
| necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery.
| Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service
| lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other
| fiber providers, cable TV...
|
| [1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-
| shoo...
|
| [2] https://ucs.net/node/513
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Poles vs trenches are a tradeoff discussion. FWIW I was
| once in construction digging trenches and I 'm German, so I
| might be biased a bit._
|
| when i got this far I literally thought you were making a
| joke about Poland.
| bcrl wrote:
| There's a huge downside to poles where I'm based: permit
| shenanigans by pole owners that delay projects and allow
| incumbents to destroy competitors. Granted, some
| municipalities do the same thing. One local municipality I
| have to deal with responds to permit requests almost
| instantly, while another takes weeks of pestering to
| acknowledge even the most basic of permit requests.
|
| For anyone starting out today, I would strongly recommend
| having a planned legal / regulatory strategy to fall back on
| in the event that excessive delays occur by parties you
| cannot avoid dealing with.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Meh, here in Germany you got the same issue with trenches.
| It takes ages to coordinate digging them, I think the worst
| example simmered for two years until the permits arrived.
| And then, it's a nightmare because you can't just cut off
| people's courtyards and parking spots for any time longer
| than absolutely required, so as soon as you're at depth you
| gotta cover the trench with steel plates so cars and
| pedestrians can cross...
| universa1 wrote:
| The fiber installing crews around here go street by
| street and usually do one street section per day/or two.
| mook wrote:
| More importantly, if they go on poles Comcast can
| "accidentally" cut their lines all the time.
| tguvot wrote:
| those days it's not trench digging (unless it's next to
| highway with machine that in one pass will trench and lay
| conduit/cable), it's trench drilling with something like this
| https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills/
|
| frontier installed fiber in my area using this method.
| relatively quick and no damage that needs to be
| "aggressively" paved over.
| rayiner wrote:
| I've been hearing about "captured government" with respect to
| fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap
| box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment
| of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill
| isn't working, because for the most part that's not the real
| problem.
|
| Why isn't the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think
| Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain
| View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is
| shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area
| is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build
| anything.
|
| Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The
| permitting took _months_. And this was to run Comcast fiber on
| poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my
| county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It's just
| that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone
| builds anything.
| xmprt wrote:
| If you think internet in the bay area is shit then you
| haven't seen how bad it can get. Even other large cities
| within California like LA and SD are worse.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Having lived in all three mentioned areas, none seemed
| particularly bad unless your standard is fiber straight to
| home. And seemed like Bay Area had more of that if
| anything.
| wmf wrote:
| I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government
| in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But
| in other places it has definitely happened.
| rayiner wrote:
| In most places, permitting is the most direct and immediate
| roadblock. If you don't start there, you won't make any
| progress on the issue.
|
| I live in a blue state that actively encourages municipal
| and cooperative fiber deployment: https://mdbc.us. It's had
| approximately zero impact outside some rural parts of the
| state.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Maybe it's good enough that not very many people care. I
| moved around San Jose, Mountain View, Berkeley, and
| Sunnyvale, never noticed problems with Comcast or AT&T. Was
| expecting flakiness after hearing all these bad stories, but
| no, it was reliable.
|
| What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload
| speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| This was even a major hurdle for Google Fiber. The incumbent
| ISPs did everything they could to obstruct them from installing
| fiber, and it was fairly effective even against someone with
| deep pockets like Google.
| xyst wrote:
| This is why national ISPs like Comcast have fought/lobbied tooth
| and nail to prevent municipal based ISPs from being created in
| various states (ie, Texas). Next logical step is starting a small
| ISP like these people have but they have the advantage of
| learning the skills and process (permitting with municipality) of
| doing this for other ISPs. There's also the capital aspect of
| this, which they apparently have.
|
| > Comcast seems to have noticed, Herman said. "They've been
| calling our clients nonstop to try to come back to their service,
| offer them discounted rates for a five-year contract and so on,"
| he said.
|
| go figure. their monopoly/duopoly has ended, profits dropping
| like a rock in area, and now they want to compete.
|
| Only billionaires and people fooled by Peter Thiel think
| competition is evil.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I am in a rural area of Texas and I just recently got access to
| fiber. The other competition is ADSL and DOCSIS providers - AT&T
| and Optimum.
|
| Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the
| day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major
| utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by
| working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that
| trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast
| over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water
| main break they caused last week.
|
| These FTTP providers have the game _solved_ in Texas. I 've seen
| them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling
| expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done
| very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers
| now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live _in_ the
| woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is
| completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the
| electricity, and they 're actively working on that in some areas
| now.
| latchkey wrote:
| I wish these guys the best, but I've shifted more and more to
| Starlink. As long as their is a clear view of the sky, it works
| exceptionally well and is more than enough bandwidth. Plus, I can
| easily take it with me anywhere I go, which includes my
| campervan. This is great for when you're out in the middle of
| nowhere, with no reception, and you need access to maps.
|
| I wish it was a bit cheaper, but someone has to fund that trip to
| Mars.
| seany wrote:
| I've really been looking at some of the new mobile options for
| when I take the family camping but I still need to get some
| stuff done. With that said, over the last 30 days at home we've
| downloaded 4.8tb and uploaded 6.2 (no torrenting). I'm sure
| there are thing we could do different, but two people that WFH
| and do some semi data involved things... really just not sure
| how we could make that work full time.
| beeb wrote:
| Wow the US really has it bad when it comes to home internet. In
| many European countries, you can get symmetric Gbit internet for
| 30-40 EUR (probably less in some places), and I haven't seen a
| data cap in forever.
| gs17 wrote:
| It's getting better here. Google Fiber is expanding to a lot of
| cities and their symmetric Gbit with no data cap is the
| equivalent of 60 EUR ($70).
| HnUser12 wrote:
| Depends on where in the US. Most populated places have
| inexpensive internet. Smaller towns have these issues because
| there's not much competition.
| radley wrote:
| Bay Area has sonic.net with unlimited 10Gb down & 1Gb up for
| only $40.
| amethyst wrote:
| *parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are
| still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of
| course.
| simoncion wrote:
| If you haven't already, check to see if either Google Fiber
| or Monkeybrains is available in your area. Last I checked,
| the regs are still in place that prevent landlords from
| denying you access to an ISP of your choice.
| slater wrote:
| Seconding monkeybrains - they can usually get to houses
| that the other ISPs can't/won't service, and speed is
| pretty spiffy
| rconti wrote:
| I don't think sonic has asymmetric internet anywhere. It used
| to be symmetric gig, now they're deploying symmetric 10gig.
| And the price is $49, although they just announced an
| increase to $59.
| danieldk wrote:
| Here symmetric 4Gbit without a data cap (NL). Best of all, you
| can bring your own equipment. I have my Ubiquiti Gateway Max
| hooked up to fiber with a media converter (yes, the Gateway Max
| does PPPoE etc.).
|
| My parents live in a small, countryside village. They have
| fiber at the same prices (including 4Gbit symmetric, though
| they are happy with a cheap 200Mbit subscription).
| sleepydog wrote:
| The EU is better on average, but isn't universally great
| either. I pay 60 EUR for 200Mbit down/20Mbit up ADSL in
| Amsterdam, after my 6-month discount ran out. No fiber in my
| neighborhood yet. There's one gigabit provider in my
| neighborhood (Ziggo) and they have a bad reputation. For the
| same price I was getting FiOS gigabit in NYC.
| jkl12 wrote:
| Would it make you jealous if I tell you, that I get 10 Gbit
| symmetric fiber here in Switzerland (greater Zurich area) for
| roughly 80 USD/month with no data cap? And I can use my own
| router and could even go up to 25 Gbit if I want ;-) Oh, and
| did I mention no CGNAT and it comes with a static /48 IPv6 net?
| sometimes_all wrote:
| I understand the need for independent fiber ISPs. But are gigabit
| speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps connection is way
| more than enough for a four-person family.
| BlimpSpike wrote:
| The article says they're a 10 person family.
| freedomben wrote:
| That's a bit more than I have (Starlink), but anytime a kid is
| downloading a big Steam game or big ISO file or something,
| everything else slows to a crawl. I also occassionally rsync
| large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also
| saturate. I've tried setting rules/priorities but it's a
| constant game of whack-a-mole
| godelski wrote:
| > I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud
| storage and that can also saturate
|
| Just offering some advice if you aren't aware. If you are,
| freely ignore. (And if you have advice in return I'd love to
| hear!)
|
| For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud
| storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0]
|
| rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to
| balance it depending if you want to be CPU bound or IO bound.
| You can pick the compression and level, with more options
| than just the `-z` flag. You can also increase speed by not
| doing the checksum, or by running without checksum and then
| running again later with. Or some intervaling like daily
| backups without and monthly you do checksums.
|
| If you tar your files up first I have a function that is
| essentially `tar cf - "${@:2}" | xz -9 --threads $NTHREADS
| --verbose > "${1}"` which uses the maximum `xz` compression
| level. I like to heavily compress things upstream because it
| also makes downloads faster and decompression is much easier
| than compression. I usually prefer being compute bound.
|
| Also, a systemd job is always nice and offers more
| flexibility than cron. It's what's helped me most with the
| wack-a-mole game. I like to do on calendar events (e.g.
| Daily, Weekly) and add a random delay. It's also nice that if
| the event was missed because the machine was off it'll run
| the job once the machine is back on (I usually make it wait
| at least 15 minutes after machine comes online).
|
| [0] https://rclone.org/
|
| [1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/292020
| freedomben wrote:
| Thank you! I do love rclone a great deal, and need to start
| using it more. I mostly use rsync right now because I've
| got some Contabo storage instances and ssh is already set
| up, so it's nice and easy, and I've already got the rsync
| commands burned into memory from decades of use :-) I also
| typically rsync with the same command to an external hard
| drive for an on-site backup.
|
| Great tips! I'll definitely be using your tar command
| godelski wrote:
| Oh, that reminds me. When I had an Android (I already
| regret my iPhone) I used termux to write a very basic
| script to rsync data to machines and do so based on if
| connected to WiFi (with whitelisted SSIDs). Pretty easy
| to write and then schedule a cron job. Can be nice to put
| that onto other peoples devices and give them automated
| backups. Makes it FAR easier to do the 321 backup
| strategy. Also pretty easy to build a tracking app for a
| lost phone that way (like if haven't connected to home
| WiFi in x days send you an email). Both work really well
| when also using tailscale.
| godelski wrote:
| Depends on what you're doing, right?
|
| Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version
| of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the
| original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do
| 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for
| any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more
| typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of
| Men). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for
| compression.
|
| Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get
| better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading
| the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and
| have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming
| and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a
| huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the
| video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].
|
| For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9
| encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but
| frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could
| probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with
| 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games,
| downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this.
| It also highly depends on the stability of your network
| connection. You're paying for * _UP TO*_ 300Mbps, not a fixed
| rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.
|
| [0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k
| when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to
| spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on
| the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen
| size (e.g. phone).
| vel0city wrote:
| Blu-rays don't do anywhere near 277Mb/s.
|
| First, if it was 2GB * 2 for the source of your recompressed
| copy, that's 4GB * 8 bits per byte = 32 Gigabits (Gb), or
| 32,000Mb. Two hours in seconds is 60 * 60 * 2 = 7,200
| seconds.
|
| 32,000 / 7,200 is 4.444Mb/s. Streaming your 2 hour long 4GB
| movie could be done with ~5Mbit. A 1Gb/s connection could
| handle streaming ~200 of these movies.
|
| Going back to Blu-rays as a source, an Ultra HD Blu-ray maxes
| out at 144Mbit but in reality most movies are encoded at a
| much lower bitrate. Most movies will cap out around
| 40-50Mbit. You could do 20 of these straight Blu-ray movies
| on a 1Gb connection.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-
| ray#Specification...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB
| and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the
| size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) =
| 277.8Mb/s.
|
| Your math is WAY off.
|
| 2 gigabytes / 2 hours is only about 2.22 megabits/sec.
| immibis wrote:
| Gigabit is the slowest reasonable fiber speed. Even 10-gigabit
| is now very cheap to the point that some gigabit equipment is
| just 10-gigabit equipment operating at a low speed. They could
| artificially throttle you to even less, if it made business
| sense.
|
| It's not a committed rate. Your individual line is a gigabit,
| but the upstream from your whole block is 10 gigabit so you
| can't all use it at once. Your guaranteed rate is probably have
| more like 20-50 Mbps, if that's what's confusing you. But it's
| extremely rare that everyone tries to use their gigabit all at
| once.
|
| If it's a Passive Optical Network, you might be sharing a
| gigabit download with your block - you all share the same fiber
| - and you get substantially less than a gigabit upload due to
| the need for timeslotting. Gigabit PON is obsolete though, now
| you'd get at least 10G PON.
| simoncion wrote:
| > But are gigabit speeds really necessary? For me, a 300 Mbps
| connection is way more than enough for a four-person family.
|
| I'm certain that one could make a sound argument that 300 Mbps
| is not necessary for that four-person family, and they could
| make do with a _much_ slower connection. Back in the day, folks
| would be asking if it 's necessary for your Internet connection
| to be always on. After all, it's no hassle at all to plug the
| modem into the house phone line and unplug it when you're done!
|
| For me, switching from a 1400/40mbps cable connection to a
| symmetric-but-variable 300-1000mbps Ethernet connection meant
| that I was doing the same sorts of things, but often spending
| much less time waiting for them to complete. Related to that,
| it also made "content creation"-esque things [0] much, _much_
| easier.
|
| [0] Which I'm declaring is a category that includes uploading
| and downloading huge files while working from home as a
| programmer/"DevOps" guy.
| tptacek wrote:
| For anyone who doesn't know the area, Saline is adjacent to Ann
| Arbor, and along with Ypsilanti makes up a sort of greater Ann
| Arbor/UMich co-prosperity sphere. Saline is the kind of place you
| expect people to stand up a private fiber ISP; a place with an
| outer-ring suburb vibe, but far from any major metro, with lots
| of nerds.
| guenthert wrote:
| Ha ha, I misread it as "Two guys hated using CompuServe, so they
| built their own ISP". Wrong millennia ...
| immibis wrote:
| Getting the rights to lay the fiber seems like the most difficult
| part, and they don't go into much detail. Which HN user knows
| something about this?
| spandrew wrote:
| I have to admit, everytime I hear the _" Two guys hated x, so
| they built their own!"_ I see the XCKD cartoon
| https://xkcd.com/927/
|
| It's not a fair comparison; competition can drive price down, but
| I pessimistically just see two guys who'll inevitably join the
| Comcast billionaires club. That's just where these "small guys"
| end up.
| coolgoose wrote:
| But kudos to them, that's the only way to break monopolies.
| Although I do wonder how much they bet on people not using all
| that bandwidth based on their promises.
| bradleyy wrote:
| From everything I've ever read and my (admittedly old) ISP
| experience, people really don't use all the bandwidth. Yes,
| occasionally there are exceptions.
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