Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast expands to hundreds of homes (2022) | Hacker News Reader

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

arstechnica.com

577 pointsvoxadam229 comments

Hey! I did this too - CenturyLink wanted an insane amount of money to bring fiber to our place, now we service hundreds and we're growing into a major contender in Boulder County - https://ayva.network

How did you get the capital and find the time to do this? Is it your full-time gig? I've always fantasized about doing this in my mountain community but it seems spooky

https://startyourownisp.com/

Useful threads:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=startyourownisp.com

I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.

You are my hero. If you have a technical write up anywhere of your story, I would love to read it.

Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).

I legit wish I had known about you a few years ago when writing my thesis. It was about community run broadband internet. I was trying to identify repeatable models for communities who wanted to run their own ISPs to use. This would have been so helpful!

Side note, truly inspirational an something I would love to do in my little village in Ohio.

I was wondering if you wouldn't mind talking more about your thesis? I am interested in rural internet as well for Native American reservations and both opie's and your comments are inspiring and something I definitely want to read.

I'm semi rural but 4.1-4.3 miles from 3 towns. I have natural gas and cable internet, but a well and septic.

I was very pleased (before making an offer on the house) to find out about the cable internet as I have worked remote for 11 years. But the ISP is Spectrum, which has historically been a very shady business (like most Cable companies, ISP's).

I also run a Mofi router with a SIM card as a back up network.

Year 1: $52/mo Year 2: $74/mo Year 3: $98/mo

I have made no changes to my account.

This is why we need choices for ISP's.

I’m curious what the economics are these days - I cofounded a small town ISP in the mid-90’s (think dial-up) and the largest monthly costs was the 24 commercial phone lines. Even though it was a loss, it was a relief to eventually sell to the local phone company 2 years later.

Bad. Our average cost to install service tends to be around $800-$1200, and that's not including overhead of setting up new towers/host sites. Our average cost to deliver service right now is about $80/mo, but the good news is that we're in a solid position to scale up to thousands of subscribers with minimal increase in overhead costs. We do it though because it makes a difference - plus I get random cookies & care packages from people, which is nice.

> I get random cookies & care packages from people

I dunno, (social) economics seem pretty sweet to me.

Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.

Give your subscribers the option to self install. Give them the tower to point their antenna toward and how to dial in the direction for max gain.

I suspect a many would jump at the opportunity as rural folks tend to be quite resourceful.

I've done this for churches for campus point to point. Don't have enough installers, but about 30% have volunteers that got it done or mostly done. Some we just did the Cat-5 terminations for them.

We did something like that starting up our ISP with fiber installations. The whole village helped digging the trenches, pulling the fiber. The welding we got a little lesson on, and then had a few people doing the fiber welding all over the village with borrowed equipment. This was about 25 years ago, webserver was running on a then ancient 8086 (or 286?) running Linux :-)

Couldn’t have been anything older than a 386 as that was minimum spec even for Linux 1.0.

Seems I have the computers mixed up in my memory, it was definitely a IBM PS/2 Model 70 486. But our computer club were running some 8086 with a version of Linux before that as a router, think you had to compile the core yourself to get it working. Not to mention getting two different network cards running... My memory is fuzzy, wasn't me doing it, just watched the guy do it and bought him lunch :-)

Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.

> In this sparsely populated rural area, "I have at least two homes where I have to build a half-mile to get to one house," Mauch said, noting that it will cost "over $30,000 for each of those homes to get served."

Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

If the $30k comes from tax dollars that the government earmarked for rural fiber, I guess so?

If it was already affordable to connect those houses there wouldn't have been a need for federal funding (not to say that I think tax dollars should be spent that way or that the program was run well).

Not wanting to make it political, but what are the chances those federal funds are flowing anymore?

Right now ISPs are very concerned about the future of money they've already been promised and pessimistic about the future of such programs. It's possible that this could result in an increased unwillingness to expand into less profitable areas or even to maintain services there.

That said, some ISPs have been known to collect hundreds of billions in taxpayer money on the promise of providing service only to just pocket that money without providing it anyway so for consumers, the real world impact of ISPs losing that money isn't so clear.

Considering that we gave AT&T nearly $400 billion in the 90s to connect everyone in the US to fiber, I certainly hope they're no longer flowing. It was a giant grift. It's taken local fiber ISPs and WISPs (who seem to have been gobbled up immediately) and Starlink to make anything happen.

1: http://irregulators.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BookofBro...

2: A more recent example from 2024: https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...

My area has a similar density and a co-op did it for $80 a month 1 gig fiber to the home. We couldn't even get DSL, and the local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it, but then just kept the money. I am extremely skeptical of claims that rural areas can't get fiber, fiber is even cheaper to hang than copper is, and yet every rural area has telephone lines and power that were put up many decades ago with even less equipment available.

>local telecomms even gathered funds locally earlier to build it

Nationwide telecomms did that with funds for fiber to the premises as well. I have no idea why these telecomms can take the money and just refuse to provide the services.

> Does spending 30k per household connected make any sense?

Over the lifetime of the structure (which can be upwards of 100 years)? Probably, just like the road, water, sewer, and electrical service to it. It’s another utility.

Water and sewer is probably well and a septic tank/leach field. The electrical service is probably at least that much though.

No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.

What kind of transport are you using to hit 2.5Gbps without fibre at that distance?

802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.

Sounds very optimistic to consistently deliver 2.5Gbps to that size of cell, your backhaul has to be huge.

It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.

I'll understand if you don't want to answer this or legally can't answer it. What does a 100gbps circuit cost a month? How about the 10gbps uplinks also?

We can't, we're under NDAs for all of that stuff :(

Roughly single-digit cents per megabit

How does that perform in heavy rain or snow? I've always been told that when dealing with mmWave, attenuation gets pretty bad when dealing with adverse climate conditions, and Boulder is surely no stranger to snow.

Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.

The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.

Fixed wireless (11/24/60 GHz point-to-point antennas) is pretty good, and the hardware would be a few thousand, but I wonder if there's an issue with the funding where it needs to be actual fiber for some reason.

My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.

This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.

Just a quick heads up that the homepage video is ~24MB over the wire, even on a phone. That might actually be a challenge if someone's WiFi is down and they're trying to get support over cellular.

(Huge kudos for this project in general)

Well... To be fairrrrrrrrrrr

If you used Ayva's fiber internet that video would download instantly =D

"Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189

I have metronet and it load in a seconds for me, tbf, I came across this thread post HNhug of death, so...

(not OP)

This nerdsniped me.

10 minutes later, and TIL: MPD is some sort of streamed-MP4 format; dash-mpd-cli is a xplatform Rust utility binary that can download this to an MP4, just given the MPD URL in dev tools.

However I keep getting 1.5 MB and 500 KB for the two videos, no matter window width. Chrome on macOS arm64, 16" MBP.

I'm curious what your environment is, if you don't mind sharing

(also, trivia for audience: last week I saw a tweet that palantir.com was doing over 100 MB worth of videos, and of course, A) they are B) they're poorly compressed, as much as 10x the bitrate they need to be.)

Frontend is full blazor w/hybrid WASM, almost zero JS, all C#. Browser DOM is controlled by the app service in realtime, I plan on using this as a basis for our subscribers to be able to do live traffic & link stats monitoring, among other things.

You are doing God's work. Thank you. I wish more people cared about wasteful bandwidth usage.

Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...

That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.

This page was 9 seconds of white screen before the entire thing loaded at once. I'm on Starlink. Hopefully you get a chance to correct this in the future, as I'm really supportive of projects like yours, but if the page was linked from a top-5 article or something I would have hit the back button already.

First Contentful Paint at 12.0 seconds here, and I'm on fiber.

On my phone on Comcast cable it was like 3 seconds for me.

Totally - we're not advertising yet and usually only dealing with very local traffic at the moment, didn't expect to get tens of thousands of hits from linking to it from a hackernews comment!

The backend is an azure appservice running on a single low-spec worker at the moment, wasn't planning on enabling scaling before doing a hard-launch but here we are.

I am sorry, I always forget about the 'HN effect'!

Also was a few seconds of white screen for me. And I'm on fiber

It's a great marketing strategy. People without broadband access will truly feel it when they visit.

Yes the white page with nothing else mad me think it was broken.

It's currently running on a single azure appworker, you might've hit it during a service autoheal/reset. There's a fair bit of overhead for every connection since it's designed for our subscribers to use and get realtime stats on their connection, was not expecting to get tens of thousands of hits by linking to it in a hacker news comment.

Xfinity's website is like that, it barely loads even using their service. I've had it time out several times, and had to start over, just trying to help my mom pay her bill.

Oh man! Wish I had found out about this 3 years ago. I am graduating in May, and I’ve had a terrible experience with Xfinity trying to self-host. CenturyLink doesn’t even service my apartment complex.

p.s self-plug: for our senior year capstone we are working on a secure/private home router firmware. Since you are in this space (tangentially) and local, I would love to chat with you

Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.

Please don’t use C !

Not sure it was that insane. The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.

At $80/month breakeven is 30 years out. Assuming no recurring costs. But there's probably positive externalities like increased property values, businesses started, remote work bringing in dollars for the local economy. It could even have positive ROI for the state if it increased tax revenue, or at least help defray the cost.

It's not crazy, but it's longer time horizons than a business would ever care about.

What metric is “insanity” and why do you find that insane?

>The author quotes a cost of over $30,000 to build a half-mile drop. I find that an insane amount of money that a government would pay to connect just one subscriber.

That's not much different than what it costs to connect them to power grid or the water and sewage system.

“Fully encrypted network with strict privacy policies”

God I wish that was me. Xfinity has a raised middle finger where the privacy policy should go.

I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.

Any plans to expand into JeffCo?

Also, this is a highly highly resource-dependent website. Consider a scale back. It'd be a funny tongue-in-cheek thing if you made it super encumbered and say "Our customers can load this page just fine!", but it's counter-intuitive for everyone else haha

I am in France so not exactly in your coverage but I wanted to not that the comparison card (and the coverage one) do not work correctly.

The first information is fine (say, speed) but when I switch to latency the graph does not change (and BTW it's not readable on mobile)

Same for the coverage

This is what I love in HN.

Someone, somewhere says that they built something for a local community and suddenly Joe from Sydney and Marie from Bordeaux are on the site, discussing its tech stack and comparing the pricing in Wakanda.

Great site.

Page never loaded for me on fiber.

I see all your replies to people; have you considered that running a video on a website is just completely unnecessary?

Video background and scroll to animate stuff was cool...in 2013. I think people appreciate a faster loading page with up front information these days.

But you do you I guess! :)

Sonic started as a little local ISP in Santa Rosa, CA.[1] Now it's huge in Northern California.

I have 1GB Sonic bidirectional fiber with unlimited data and could get 10GB if I wanted. The head of Sonic points out that long-haul prices have decreased over the years, and there's no real need for usage limits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_(ISP)

I have missed Sonic every day since moving from Oakland to SF

Self-quoting[0]:

> Sonic has the best customer service of any company ever encountered, and it's not even close. The few times I've had to contact them for assistance, I've been very quickly connected with someone clearly _very_ technical who was able to grok my problem immediately and give clear, cogent, respectful debugging advice and perspective. I do not exaggerate when I say I would gladly pay double their current rate just for the peace of mind of knowing that I can depend on them if I ever need their support again. Not that I often do, because their baseline connectivity/speed is also great.

> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42252183

This has been my experience with our local ISP in Minneapolis as well. Granted, I’ve only ever reached out to them maybe 3 times over 6 years, but each time they’ve been exceptional. No more than two phone rings before a person in our metro area answered, they got me to right person who provided actual good believable information and the situation was fixed. The first time I ever reached out to them, by email, I wasn’t even a customer— I was calling to ask when they would resurface a sidewalk that they had torn up for an install in my neighborhood. The director of operations emailed me back, not with an exact date but with a pretty detailed reason for the delay that was clearly written just for this situation, not a form letter, and then he followed up when the work was scheduled.

I just wish they more reliably covered SF. Outside of the Richmond and Sunset districts coverage is spotty at best

When the biggest criticism someone can level at a company is "I wish they had more coverage", they're doing it right :)

> ...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.

Properly good, human and effective customer service is so rare these days that I tend to trust hyperbolic reviews like these more than others, believing that the person honestly feels that way, having been there myself.

I have their 10GB line and I could NOT be happier. Only company where I reply to their “please rate us emails"

I have their 10G service. I love the company and the people. I remember when I first called them to sign up. At the end of the call with the sales guy I told him that 30 minute conversation was one of the most interesting and fun conversations I had ever had with someone I had just met. It was surreal.

The installer was super nice and great at their job.

Their service is so good I have not had an excuse to talk with anyone else.

Many of my neighbors have switched from Comcast, who I was with for more than 10 years, and hated every second of it. Only AT&T is worse than Comcast, but they are both bottom dwellers.

This ISP was actually part of a detailed study in my college class on networking. The founder created a singular example of an "open-source ISP" [1], and I am pretty sure you can find his guidance online somewhere if you were inclined to build your own.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

To get maximum effect, he now needs to write a book. Eventually, someone will come along and make the book into a movie. Soon after, that movie will be shown via Comcast!

Once all the work has been done and this guy is making money I suspect comcast or another ISP will buy his network and the rights to the movie, then jack up the prices considerably so these people will be paying even more to watch it on the ISP owned streaming service

He gave a presentation at NLNOG 2020, "Getting Fiber To My Town":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

* Slides: https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf

* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910

* He posted some replies in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jaredmauch

Involves trenchers. Also, at NANOG, "Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to my Neighbors":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo

I read about “future proofing” and “expansion” possibilities of one’s fiber connection. And related user equipment.

My story is in the opposite direction.

We and everyone else in the neighborhood had symmetrical 1 Gbps installed about 15 years ago. We all paid the ISP for the top tier of full capacity.

During Covid decided to take inventory of our actual bandwidth needs.

Anything that can be deferred doesn’t count. Gone from instant bandwidth requirements are all cloud backups, OTA OS upgrades and apps updates. They need to complete overnight. Overlapping is not a requirement.

Videos are automatically played at 480p or less on iPhones, 720p or less on iPads and 1080p or less on HDTV. We purposely didn’t buy 4K TV because at our viewing distance has no benefits whatsoever. Aggregate peak bandwidth required here is 25 Mbps at a stretch. That is also enough for my wife to work from home.

We don’t deal with large datasets or raw videos over the internet.

So we found ourselves with one cable connected TV and the usual assortment of mobile devices connected to one WiFi 4 1x1 hotspot. At 70 Mbps we never noticed any loss of quality in our digital lifestyle.

After about ten years we replaced the hotspot with one capable of WiFi 5. An overkill but needed the extra port.

Eventually convinced the ISP to lower our subscription to the lowest available tier of 200 Mbps. We don’t notice any difference. We could afford the extra bandwidth. But don’t see the benefits of it.

Gigabit internet, or even >100mbps internet, is burst capacity. Very few people hit gigabit speeds continuously, and those that do often hit either bandwidth caps or fair use policy limitations. It's also why ISPs can use a 10gbps fiber backbone to serve gigabit to 50-100 homes, because the probability of all of those homes capping out their bandwidth at the same time is tiny.

That's also why a lot of supposedly fast ISPs absolutely crumbled when COVID hit. A lot of people started doing video calls in the morning/afternoons, which suddenly sent latency-sensitive, bidirectional, high-bandwidth data to every corner of the network. Upload speeds collapsed, gigabit networks were struggling to hit a couple hundred mbps, and DSL providers downgraded their customers to 2005 in terms of attainable network speeds.

For that reason, I think ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default. Their customer base is not going to make use of that capacity anyway. Only when downloading a new game, or doing a backup, or uploading a video file somewhere, does that bandwidth become a necessity. If you remove the cap on the bandwidth side, all of that capacity will remain available for a longer period of time for all of the other people in the neighbourhood.

Some cellular providers used the same reasoning for their plans here a few years back: there were no 4G speed caps, just upload/download as fast as you can, because if you're done doing your file transfer quicker, you're clearing the airwaves for other users. Of course, you'd still pay for those hefty bandwidth caps, charging >€1 per GB per month to rake in the cash.

Indeed. Guaranteed capacity for FTTH in the EU is often 0.1% or so of peak. Consistent with your answer.

I am not sure maximizing throughput to gigabit and beyond is materials efficient though. Fig 33 shows energy efficiency is squarely on the FTTH side anyway: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Prysmian-s...

A software update completing download in an hour instead of one minute often doesn’t lead to any practical difference. The same number of users is being served but the latter requiring gigabit class CPEs.

Alas it does offer some up selling opportunities. As promoting Cat 6 or even 7 cables to home users.

> ISPs may as well offer 10gbps as a default

You're thinking with a technical mind, but don't forget the business, marketing, legal and support.

Why have "unlimited" speed as baseline while you can charge some 10 times more for the privilege?

Also don't forget that if you sell "10gbps internet" you might have to legally guarantee a percentage of that. Or you have to explain how networking works to everyone who complains they never see 10gbps on Speedtest.net.

Also the more you offer, the more expensive your modem has to be.

Thinking about when I had to upgrade my elderly parents from ADSL to FTTC, because of old apparatuses being scheduled for decommissioning, often wondering why regulators went down this path. Forcing CPEs replacement when, especially for tens of millions of elderly users, enabling ADSL2+ Annex M would have been sufficient. Most FTTC apparatuses are backward compatible with ADSL2+ and only transmission power auto backdown is necessary. To prevent degradation of neighboring VDSL signals.

My parents have now 150/30 Mbps. Totally unaware of it.

Around 8 years ago I saw an AT&T truck on our street, and the guys installing some fiber into our street conduits. I was ecstatic & started checking AT&T website periodically to see when the service will be enabled.

Guess what? It's still not enabled. AT&T only did it because there was a risk that Google Fiber will do it in our city. Unfortunately, IIUC, Google never could overcome local regulations and abandoned the project. So, AT&T didn't care to light up their fiber (that was already in the ground & ready to go!!!).

Comcast doesn't offer any cable in my location neither.

I've been seriously tempted to do it myself too, but doubt I'll ever have time for that - mostly to overcome the local bureaucracy to get all the permits...

Huge respect to Jared!

oh, ~4 years ago I talked to Sonic guys at length (great company, btw!) - they were too far north from us, and their estimation was to make it viable for them, they'd need to have around 200 of my neighbors commit to switching to Sonic at once if they lay out the fiber in our location.

Having switched from Comcast it is well worth it.

In Russia we get 500-1000mbps (for real) for about 5-10$ monthly, every home has few ISP options with free installation

My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.

Internet pricing is a scam in the USA.

I believe that in Russia you wrestle bears and that the only liquid anyone drinks is vodka, but this I simply cannot believe :)

Labor costs are lower. The US has the highest cost of labor in the world for many jobs that would be relatively inexpensive elsewhere.

Why is labour so expensive in the US? Is it because of healthcare costs being passed to employers?

Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).

I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)

Mostly because most people have lots of options for employment and they typically don’t take the low options. In a place with nationalised healthcare you would still be paying for it through taxes paid by the labourer but I guess the system would be a bit more progressive than in the US so lower-skill labour would demand a smaller premium for healthcare. Though I think there’s probably more than just labour costs in the US. Eg maybe it is expensive to get the right permits to install fibre optic cables.

Average salary nowadays is 800-1000$/mnt (after 30-40% taxes), I would expect internet price in US to be proportional to their labor costs

Russia probably has state owned poles.

In most US places, utility companies own the poles and it’s ridiculously expensive to lease space. Urban areas with competitive ISPs usually have government owned poles or leases for streetlight arbs that allow them to string fiber.

That's a weird analysis of US policy. Very few places in the US have privately owned poles. What most places have is private poles on public right of way. It's a worst of both worlds scenario. Where somehow public infrastructure is used to exclusively further private interests.

Sounds like they own the poles bro.

Russian public infrastructure is vastly different compared to the US though. It's probably much easier to run Internet to 10 apartment homes housing 1000 people than to 300 single family houses with the same amount of people.

In Russia you get pseudo-internet without Youtube, Instagram, X, Discord, The Internet Archive, many news sites.

Abit inconsistent you’ll need to use VPN. (Don’t we have to use it in liberal countries too if open torrents) It’s just some resources are blocked, it isn’t as bad as in China or Iran. Previously internet was same cheap but not so restricted

I hope more community ISPs happen <3

Comcast and others have been using the corruption of our representatives to push for bans of community ISPs.

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/07/16-u-s-states-still-ban-...

When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.

Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.

It's illegal in most places, because the large incumbents are using a corrupt government to protect their revenue streams.