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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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)…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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?
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").
> 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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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).
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
> 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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
The eggs need some chickens first.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
>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.
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)…
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.
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.
Pardon my ignorance but what is the benefit to ipv6 for local, consumer internet?
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.
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.
Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!
Thanks for saying so - I got a flyer and didn't realize they are local.
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.
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.
Ha ha, I misread it as "Two guys hated using CompuServe, so they built their own ISP". Wrong millennia ...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
Nice analogy!
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.
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.
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.
For the same reason you called the phone company when your phone went out, not a phone plumber.
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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?
The guest wifi - Xfinity WiFi - can be disabled.
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...
Last I checked (years ago) it turned itself back on any time the router was power cycled.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Depends on where in the US. Most populated places have inexpensive internet. Smaller towns have these issues because there's not much competition.
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).
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).
Bay Area has sonic.net with unlimited 10Gb down & 1Gb up for only $40.
*parts of the Bay Area. I'd say the majority of areas are still monopolized by Comcast, including my neighborhood of course.
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)
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.
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).
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
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
The article says they're a 10 person family.
Congrats! I grew up just down the road from Saline. Exciting to see this happening on my old stomping grounds. Best of luck.
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...
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.