Brothers-in-law use construction knowledge to compete against Comcast in Michigan.
Comcast et al have taken (literal) billions of public dollars to expand rural broadband service.
Instead of laying fiber, they used that money to change the definition of broadband.
If corporations are people we need to be able to institute the death penalty for them too.
Can we hang Ronald McDonald first! Yee haw!
Good. Now expand to the rest of the world. Comcast and their partners are everywhere, and they all suck.
If they expand then they’ll end up just another evil corporate ISP, and/or if they start getting large enough one of the other ISPs will buy them up.
They don’t need to expand, there just needs to be many more small, ultra local providers.
The deregulation in the 90s is what killed the local ISP. Thanks, Bill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
To be fair, in 1996 both the Senate and the House were controlled by republicans, those the bill passed both chambers by an overwhelmingly bipartisan majority. Even if Clinton wanted to veto the bill, Congress would have still been able to push it through.
I know. Isn’t great? When there’s no party in true “control” then whoever wants to think it’s the other guy’s fault can easily do so.
I was already an adult in 1996. It was definitely a bipartisan thing. Despite many tech insiders warning how it would cause the exact opposite of what it was intended to do, Clinton didn’t just sign it. He and Al Gore, for years, claimed it as their own.
Hell, it was this exact act Al Gore was referring to when he claimed he “invented” the Internet.
Running fiber for a small installation kind of warms the heart.
I wonder if some big ISP will roll in there find their IP blocks and start throwing copyright claims at them. Bury them in legal fees than buy them out for a pittance.
This is more or less how FCIX got started
I’d be more curious about the BGP peerings
Does anyone know there AS number?
Verizon or another telecom will buy them out and then sell it to AT&T or cut a deal with Comcast when they’re done fucking it up. I’m glad they accomplished this, and I hope they prosper but I’m really pessimistic about telecom companies and their out of control government supported monopolies.
God bless em.
Fiber of course is preferable, but requires a lot of knowledge and up front investment to lay. In Philadelphia there’s a WISP - wireless internet service provider - that has their equipment up on a tower and can service a particular neighborhood: https://phillywisper.net/
I was ready to use them but our apartment building had made a fucking exclusive agreement with Comcast. If we lived in a normal house at that same address we could have got FIOS or PhillyWisper.
Have you checked with the WISP to see if the exclusivity contract does in fact stop you from getting their service?
I worked for a WISP that laughed at those contracts and stuck an antenna on a windowsill. The exclusivity is for the DMARC and wiring going to your unit. If the WISP doesn’t need it then theres nothing in their way. It’s like sticking one of those cell sites in your house, who’s going to stop you?
Thanks for the suggestion. I did check with them, unfortunately it didn’t work, I think because our window wasn’t in their line of sight. Guy said he’d talked to other people in my building before.
Yeah, line of sight can be a real killer for that type of signal. Is the object that is blocking the view just another building? You could make friends in that building and get them to sign up. Then that building that was in the way is now what they want line of sight to!
WISPs won’t really go down this road explaining all of that to a customer. It sounds unprofessional and unreliable, and on the flip side the buildings that realize they’re an important relay start to charge higher rent for that antenna on the roof…so this angle is rarely discussed. But it’s essentially how they grow their network.
I’ve sat on a roof before looking at a building a block down the road thinking damn that building needs to just go away. After the job I’d go to the marketing team and tell them how great it would be to get in that building. They would decend on that building like vultures. Your WISP may have even targeted that building and got in there because you checked!
Oh good to know. We moved before the date on that document though.
I’m personally more interested in community WISPs
Cool company though
