Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes

> Comcast once told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house—and that he would have gone with Comcast if they only wanted $10,000.

Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.

You need big trucks, drills, excavating equipment, skilled union workers making good wages, safety concerns around water, gas, sewer, electrical and other communication lines, you can't mess up peoples lawns, you have to go out and maintain these systems after storms.

And people want this all for $55/month!

Its so expensive that Comcast only made a profit of 42 Billion in 2021, while providing a lower quality of service than what a small ISP in Michigan can give you for a one time 2M in government grants.

> Starts his own company and finds out it costs $30,000 to do it.

There are two homes that are a half mile away from the others. The $30k number relates to those two properties.

The little guy in Michigan also doesn't own the NBC broadcasting network, theme parks... Comcast didn't make $42B off it's cable subscribers.

You should check their quarterly earnings I think you would be shocked. In the second quarter Cable and Broadband account for 7.4 Billion in profit, and have a profit margin near 50%. NBC Universal only accounts for 1.9 Billion and their theme parks are 632 Million. By far cable is the largest driver of profit.

https://www.cmcsa.com/news-releases/news-release-details/com...

The correct price in cities is $10 a month. The correct price in rural areas is $500 a month plus. But we have to average them because we insist on taxing cities to subsidise rural lifestyles...

The corn has to be grown somewhere.

The funny thing is I'd be totally okay paying $500/mo for good Internet service outside the city. The problem with this is that even in the city where Comcast has it's headquarters they will lie to you and then not show up at the agreed upon time scheduled 3 months in advance /and paid for/, then try to blame you for it and take no accountability. Which is exactly what Comcast did when I tried to get connected in my move last month. So, sure, organizations have Product teams that focus on pricing strategy, and part of that is amortizing capital costs to serve those customers and also averaging out the per-customer cost of service, but a bigger issue is that Comcast is just really bad at doing it's supposed job.

I wish there was a rural fiber or muni fiber project near me that I could subscribe to, and I'd happily pay 3x-4x what I pay Comcast, if I had some assurance that the person on the other end of the phone would actually keep their commitments and know what they are doing.

Us vs them is not cool. Every lifestyle has value.

As someone who actually was working in excavation for internet... well, some points to unpack here:

- You don't hire your own workers to dig trenches as an ISP, you sub-contract that stuff out to contractors - they can spread out the cost of, say, a backhoe not over the one year or two you need to build out a district's fiber, but over twenty years.

- Other underground stuff isn't much of an issue in rural areas - you have the central map register of the district which shows exactly where active lines are, and there aren't many. Usually it's the 10 kV/220V electricity line, water mains and the huge POTS cable. Sewers in most cases aren't much of a concern as they tend to be built very deep (here in Germany, minimum 100cm below ground level, and usually it's more like 2-3 meters). In rural areas you can usually get away with shooting a mole through the ground or a plough for a trench that a following tractor immediately closes after the pipe is laid in.

- That pipe or whatever you're building out underground can last literally for decades. POTS cable in many cases is over fifty years old, personally I have seen stuff that was covered in clay protection plates with swastikas meaning it was well over 70 years old. At 50 years, the life time earning of a connection is 33.000$.

- Governments usually subsidize the cost because broadband is an extremely net-positive investment. Assume a small village of 100 people gets broadband Internet uplink - now a small company moves into some farmer's shed because the rent is cheap and now pays tens of thousands a year in corporate and employment taxes.

And it doesn't take very many people to do it.

with taxpayer subsidies, to put in our gasoline

That's fine, as long as you will pay the same sums to support whatever weird lifestyle choices I make...

In many rural places in the US, the majority of homes have their own septic tank and leech field. Some homes (although it's much rarer) even haul in their own water by truck. Power and phone are often on poles. They probably use LP gas brought in by truck. So often the main concern is the water mains.

If I could get at actual good speed instead of being limited to 6/1 I would have no issue paying $500. I get a ton of value from the internet.

Lots of rural folks rely on well water.

I live in one of those rural homes. We only get electricity (and natural gas too, but that's unusual around here) brought in. Water and sewer are on-site. Phone is VoIP. Internet is wireless (via an ISP I built). Rural piped water is very rare here.

True. Many of the places that are low-hanging fruit for rural Internet access do not, but it's a mix. Many of these places that the comments are dismissing as irredeemably remote are along secondary highways less than five miles from a city limit. Lots of those places have water mains, but certainly there are places with private wells.

“Sums”?

Amounts of money.