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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 1 comments | 10 Aug 22 13:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.319s | source
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bluedino ◴[10 Aug 22 13:43 UTC] No.32411780[source]▶
> 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!

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LatteLazy ◴[10 Aug 22 14:22 UTC] No.32412459[source]▶
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...
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1. tristor ◴[10 Aug 22 14:44 UTC] No.32412848[source]▶
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.