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

(arstechnica.com)
1135 points carride | 2 comments | 10 Aug 22 13:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.44s | source
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samwhiteUK ◴[10 Aug 22 13:45 UTC] No.32411821[source]▶
I'm going to put my hand up and say I have absolutely no idea how an ISP works. He runs cables to each house in the area... now where does the other end go?
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the_only_law ◴[10 Aug 22 13:47 UTC] No.32411847[source]▶
Not sure if it’s what the person in question did, but there’s a whole guide that pops up on here occasionally regarding building a wireless ISP.

https://startyourownisp.com/

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dataflow ◴[10 Aug 22 13:57 UTC] No.32412013[source]▶
I can't find any section of that guide that talks about peering or whatever ISPs are supposed to do to connect to the broader internet. Do you see any step that explains this?
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haunter ◴[10 Aug 22 13:59 UTC] No.32412058[source]▶
It's the 2nd step

https://startyourownisp.com/posts/fiber-provider/

If you just Google then it's usually called leased or dedicated internet

Just some (US) examples

https://www.business.att.com/products/att-dedicated-internet...

https://business.comcast.com/learn/internet/dedicated-intern...

https://www.verizon.com/business/products/internet/internet-...

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dataflow ◴[10 Aug 22 14:01 UTC] No.32412093[source]▶
So they're leasing ("buying"?) fiber from the same ISPs they're trying to displace and relying on that payment to provide them with continued internet access? This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP, but something akin to an MVNO where they're at the mercy of the same companies they're competing with. I get the initial sale might seem fine, and the established ISPs might be fine with this as long as the company is small, but why wouldn't these companies shut them off (or raise the prices, etc.) when they grow too big to become dangerous?
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dboreham ◴[10 Aug 22 16:05 UTC] No.32414285[source]▶
You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources. It's like saying that if you build a gas station and buy your gas from Exxon then that's bad because Exxon also operates gas stations. It's not like an MVNO where all you're doing is sending the customer a bill, and provisioning API requests to Verizon.
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1. dataflow ◴[10 Aug 22 16:12 UTC] No.32414383[source]▶
> You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources.

The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen. It's not like the executives are oblivious to how much money each unit is making and whether another unit could make more in place of it. If you're the CEO and see you could charge twice as much by doing retail instead of wholesale then you'd obviously try to do that.

Rather, the explanations I'm getting from the other comments seems to be that (a) regulators require some kind of reasonable wholesale to exist to third parties, (b) the big ISPs aren't planning to serve those markets anyway, so they're not missing out on any income by taking money from the last-mile ISPs. And as long as those last-mile ISPs don't try to compete for the same customers then they're fine.

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2. fragmede ◴[10 Aug 22 18:44 UTC] No.32416660[source]▶
> The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen.

Then you've not worked in large B2B companies before. Eg Apple pays Google money and Google pays money to Apple, any perceived public rivalry goes out the window as far as business between the two is concerned.

If you're the CEO of Comcast, you've never even heard of this small time ISP, you have far bigger things to spend your time on, and the "upstream" business unit of Comcast really doesn't care what you're doing, so long as your money's green. It's all business. See also: Netflix using AWS despite Amazon having a streaming video service of their own.