Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast expands to hundreds of homes (2022)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Article context & meta

  • Commenters note the story is from 2022 and link to prior HN coverage; the title is updated to include the year.
  • Some see the narrative as movie-worthy and predict that if the project succeeds, incumbents may eventually buy it and raise prices.

Starlink, WISPs, and last‑mile tech

  • Many wonder how Starlink changes the landscape: it is praised as disruptive to small wireless ISPs (WISPs), especially for temporary/remote use, but criticized for latency variation and oversubscription.
  • Several argue nothing beats local fiber for reliability and future capacity, but outline major barriers: easements/right-of-way, pole-attachment bureaucracy, trenching/boring, restoration, and high labor/equipment costs.
  • Some small operators advocate fixed wireless (11/24/60/70 GHz) as dramatically cheaper than $30k/house fiber drops, reporting real multi‑gigabit links with mesh backhaul and fallbacks to 5 GHz.

Economics and feasibility of small/community ISPs

  • Multiple small-ISP operators describe self-funded efforts: hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital, years of unpaid work, and per‑home install costs around $800–$1,200, with ongoing delivery costs near $80/month per subscriber.
  • Subsidies can make rural fiber viable, though commenters debate whether $30k per connected home is a sensible public spend; some frame broadband as core infrastructure like power or water.
  • One “reformed ISP owner” warns against starting an ISP at all, implying unprofitable or high‑pain customers, but offers no details.

Regulation, incumbents, and municipal/community networks

  • Many report incumbents lobbying for state laws that hinder or effectively ban municipal broadband, often via astroturfed “grassroots” campaigns and misleading messaging about costs.
  • Others note these laws usually target government-owned networks, not private community ISPs, though they still tilt the economics against public projects.
  • Examples are given of co‑ops and local initiatives that succeeded despite resistance, and of large telcos taking subsidies without delivering promised build‑outs.

Service quality, pricing, and privacy

  • Small ISPs (including the one in the article and others like Sonic) are praised for technical competence, honest single-line pricing, symmetric gigabit, and excellent support.
  • Global price comparisons highlight how expensive and asymmetric many US offerings are versus Europe, Russia, Japan, and New Zealand.
  • One small operator emphasizes strict privacy, minimal logging, and refusal to monetize user data, contrasted with large ISPs’ tracking and “unlimited” plans with hidden limits.

Website and user experience

  • The article subject’s and another small ISP’s websites are discussed: one is extremely minimal (seen as reassuring), the other uses heavy video and Blazor, causing slow loads and crashes under HN traffic.
  • This sparks a side debate about bandwidth‑heavy marketing sites versus lean, fast pages—especially ironic for companies selling better connectivity.