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Comment by globalnode | Hacker News Reader

At least you don't live in australia, where the govt invested in a national broadband network so every aussie could have affordable and fast internet. Guess what we have. A broken cesspool of providers where its going to cost you in excess of $1K p/a to keep a connection to the internet going. Well done straya. Its the same with anything where theres the potential to fleece consumers.

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Depending on where you are in the US, it isn't much better. I'm paying $140/month for a 2gb/120mb asymmetric cable connection... I'm paying about that much again for a dedicated server on OVH mostly because they block self-hosting on residential connections, and it costs more than the difference to go to a business connection with a /28 cidr, so I'm renting a server with a better connection instead.

I've been a bit lazy and haven't finished my migration off of google and MS services... I have mixed feelings about my testing of nextcloud and the like. I've got a pretty solid mail solution (mailu) going, but even with that I don't have it on a domain/address I rely on. I'm mostly using a wildcard forward on one of my domains so I can assign a different address to most online and offline accounts as reference.

$50 a month and still on 2mb ADSL. Living in the centre of the city right next to a hotel that owns an 10Gbit feed. Literally ten steps from my apartment to the cities main telephone line exchange

All three domestic providers do the "we are working in your area" which where it comes to my building "nah" is said and the promises of fast broadband suddenly disappear.

I've been living here 8 years now. Same thing said each year.

That sucks... I was stuck in a similar spot for several years at one point. ADSL is definitely on the not fun side of things. Do you know who that hotel's uplink is? You might be able to talk to them about running a direct line, though this will probably cost about $10k or more just to get the line run to your home.

I've tried. Their line is connected to the same exchange as my ADSL and via BT who are tasked to upgrade UKs domestic to fibre by the end of 2026.

I have even asked if I provided the equipment run a Line-of-Sight links from the hotel to my apartment. Perfect range and advantage point but nothing other than some PR fluff of "it may harm the public".

No, a hotel manager isn’t going to want your antenna on their roof. From their perspective it’s unnecessary and weird and therefore out of the question.

BT sells internet service, transit, and buried cables. You want to do what the hotel did and buy a buried cable from them, and then buy transit. You’ll need to do like the guy in the video did and rent some space in their colocation facility to put your gateway in. Plug your buried cable into your gateway, plug your gateway into their router, turn on BGP, etc.

They also offer an intermediate service called a “leased line” which is a buried cable plus transit plus they handle all of the networking for you as if you were a consumer. The hotel chain might have gone that route as well, although there are clear advantages to having your own AS. You can figure out exactly what they did if you connect to their guest WiFi and run `traceroute -A`…

Of course your apartment manager (or the owner) might not agree to let you bury your cable on their property. They might even have an exclusivity agreement with the cable company. This could even be the reason why no other ISP is available in your apartment building.

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