montasaurus

stamina is an opinionated wrapper around tenacity, so either works great

Thank you. How many neighbors are you thinking? It really depends on how many buildings they are in / how far apart they are, and what percentage use you as their provider. At smaller scales, it's much better to have an "in" with the building (HOA, owner, etc.) so you can market more effectively, outweighing the revenue risk of having a small number of customers.

Sonic has a fantastic privacy policy. For comparison, we follow all the same tenets and believe that both contractual and technical safeguards are the best way to ensure our operators do as well. We should definitely be more public about that to non-customers though--both so prospective customers know and to make sure there's public accountability behind it.

I saw a demo of this in Oakland a few months ago. I thought it was super interesting, especially the way they're extending routing concepts. It feels like a very elegant technical solution.

I don't think of it as a question of fortitude as much as opportunity cost. We're looking for operators that would be successful running other types of businesses instead. We want them to choose the ISP business over one that they might be more familiar with. No doubt they could come to understand a transit contract and all the other components, but it's frictions like those that reduce the number of people who decide being an ISP is the right business for them. If you can 1) find customers and 2) provide a great service experience, we want you selling internet! You can spend a lifetime getting good at those two things. We'd rather our operators do that, and we can handle the networking for them.

Getting good terms from an ILEC that you're directly competing with will be difficult. We advocate building your own last mile infrastructure where possible to get around that. Here in SF, we're using fixed wireless to do that.

We use fixed wireless for our last mile (60GHz and 5.8GHz in SF). We haven't been reliant on Local Exchanges. We'd typically be selling to residential end users (single family homes and/or MDUs).

Thanks! Going through Comcast / AT&T isn't the only path to the internet, plenty of other companies sell the backhaul services that we need--Hurricane Electric, Zayo, Cogent, CenturyLink, etc..

Monitoring traffic and throttling it are both network-level interventions that we won't implement or support in a way that can be abused like that. We don't want to expose our operators to the liability of even collecting this type of info.

We monitor your infrastructure (out of band, where possible) and let you know when things go wrong and how to fix it. When the fixing requires physical intervention, we guide you through that. Similarly for installations, where we teach you how to do them and you (or your employees or contractors) perform the physical installation. We'll help you more generally with the business as well, and share advice on how to effectively run an ISP.

Let us know if you speak with them--we're interested in having an existing ISP in the batch.

It makes sense for a wide range of densities. Getting MDUs is really nice, because your marginal cost to serve another customer in the building is really low. Downside is that it may be more competitive. Rural areas present a different business model, where you may have to go long distances and charge enough to support the infrastructure that requires. Single family homes in suburban/urban densities are right in between.

Each of the cases can work, you just need to make sure you're running the right kind of ISP for the market.

It's largely an infrastructure business at the end of the day, and not without its challenges. The real problem is that there are people willing to take on these challenges, but they get stuck as early as the "get an uplink" part of that process.

Just digging into that piece, there are a lot of decisions. Burstable or dedicated? Why are they billing based on 95th percentile? How much bandwidth should I budget per subscriber? The typical uplink quote we've seen has 6 different tables with like 80 different prices on it. If you've bought it before, you know what the tradeoffs are. If you haven't, that's a steep hill to climb just for step 1 of the process.

We deploy fixed wireless here in SF, mainly 60GHz and 5.8GHz. They require line of sight, but something like Baicells could be a good fit for areas where that's more of an issue. It's not just the NIMBYs when you go to hang/bury your own lines, the incumbents will box you out on power poles and generally make things difficult for you.

We've been able to source enough IPv4s for our needs so far, but we don't expect that to last forever. ARIN is cutting off the allocations, but there are still a decent amount available for lease.

When someone resets their router, it clears the auth details and their internet stops working. With DHCP, it'll "just work" when the device comes back up. You just need to be a bit smart about figuring out which device belongs to who. DHCP Option 82 is a tagging mechanism that allows you to do this without creating a hard dependency on the physical address of the customer's router.

Working on all the networking & routing was definitely the most fun part for me. Unfortunately, not everyone finds it nearly as interesting. We just don't feel that a distaste for the OSI model should preclude someone from running a great business.

Nice catch on the PPPoE. Our gear didn't support Option 82 at the time, but now that it does, we're switching to DHCP. PPPoE is definitely a pain in the butt.

We definitely want to make sure that nobody's left high and dry in any set of circumstances. Obviously, we hope to happily partner with our operators indefinitely, but we wouldn't ask someone to commit their capital and ask their customers to depend on them without having these contingencies covered. Companies have started & run ISPs before Necto (of course), but there are significant cost and knowledge hurdles that keep a lot of operators out. I think of it like with Squarespace, where the knowledge of self-hosting a website may be outsourced, but the end result is broader access to the benefits of having an internet presence.

Also, big shout out to Graham (the author of startyourownisp.com). We met, and he's super knowledgeable. I encourage anyone interested to read his guide, it's very good. We don't see our offerings as directly competitive, and share a common goal of increasing connectivity.

Very cool program, thanks! There are a few programs (both public and private) that will provide funding for starting ISPs. It really shows that access to capital isn't the main roadblock people face when starting ISPs. Or rather, that other groups are working to solve the capital access issue--we're working on solving the others.

Unfortunately not in this batch--mainly because of travel and regulatory differences.

We service some "DSL dead zones" like that...it's crazy to see the prices people are forced into paying. We had one customer that was paying over $100/mo for low single digit Mbps before they switched.

Thankfully it's gotten a lot better since then. The RF tech has improved dramatically and bulk bandwidth costs are much more reasonable. Is it Proxim?

Definitely! I'll shoot you an email.

Peering exchanges are great, and a more cost-effective way of reaching other participant networks vs paying for transit. Our local exchange is called SFMIX (https://sfmix.org/). They're a great and under-appreciated group working hard to improve connectivity.

The fact that you can reach almost any IP address is kind of a small miracle when you start digging into it. There are a bunch of interesting examples of addresses becoming unreachable or sent to the wrong destination, both accidentally and intentionally.

The BGP protocol is how each network announces what IP addresses can be reached through them. Those announcements can often be faked, in a process called BGP Hijacking. This happened to EtherWallet: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17275982/myetherwallet-ha...

Some address ranges are reserved for internal use within each network. If the network is big enough, some network operators "borrow" other less-used public IP addresses and re-purpose them for internal use. This means that traffic inside that network or transiting through it can't reach those IP addresses. Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server (and 1.0.0.0/8 more generally) are affected by that a lot: https://blog.cloudflare.com/fixing-reachability-to-1-1-1-1-g...

Also, sometimes single point of failure connections just...break. It's not guaranteed that every connection is redundant, and it's definitely possible for chunks of the internet to just be "disconnected" from the rest.

This is a great guide--I highly recommend reading it if you're interested in the space. We met Graham (the author) and he really knows his stuff.

That gets into a really interesting aspect of how the internet works. It's not really one entity, the way people sometimes think about it. In reality, it's a bunch of interconnected networks owned by different people like you mentioned. How it works is that you buy something called "transit", which is the right to send traffic to a neighboring network, who is then responsible for trying to pass it along to the destination network or to another intermediary network. Depending on where the traffic is going, this handoff process can happen multiple times before it reaches the destination.

Sometimes, the connections between these networks can get congested...or network owners can allow them to become congested as a way to extract payments from other network owners. This is what happened to Netflix. The different networks are called Autonomous Systems, and each one has a number called an ASN. The path a packet takes between those systems is called an AS Path. When networks interconnect, it's called Peering. Sometimes those peering agreements are settlement-free (no payments), and sometimes one network pays the other (like when you buy transit).

It looks like that 10-K is for Sonic the fast food chain. I believe Sonic the ISP is still a private company.

We have an ISP in San Francisco and it really is a great business. Lots of long lasting recurring revenue and very low recurring costs--bandwidth is actually one of our smallest expenses. The biggest hurdle is really tapping in to the tribal knowledge on how to set up and run an ISP. You've got networking, provisioning, how to buy bandwidth, even what type of power plugs you need to have in your rack (spoiler: there are multiple and they are not all compatible). Besides the cost of initial deployment and setting up new customers, there's not a whole bunch you need to spend money on.

We really like the business, and more people really should start their own. The numbers make sense in a bunch of different markets and scales. If you deploy with fixed wireless, it brings the costs down to the 10's of thousands of dollars range. Laying fiber is obviously a lot more expensive, but not really necessary in most circumstances.

We're working on helping more people start ISPs-launching here on HN next week, but TechCrunch wrote about the project just now: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/necto-looks-to-help-indivi...

Blackcomb Software | San Francisco, CA | Full Time | ONSITE

Hey, my name's Adam and I'm looking for help creating the next generation of field service management software. We started inside an air conditioning company in Sarasota, FL building the software we needed to manage our growth. Today, the systems we developed are in use at the largest HVAC companies in the nation.

Our goal is to be the platform that every HVAC company loves to use and can't live without. At our core is the belief that we can achieve this through a deep understanding of what makes our user's lives simpler.

I'm looking for someone to lead the development of this platform. Here are some traits that define this person:

* Hungry to learn the details of an established and "old-fashioned" industry * Excited by the prospect of improving someone's quality of life through automation * Comfortable architecting and coding effective software solutions, actively participating in recruiting, and managing the same in others * Inspired to bring economic prosperity to hard-working people across the country

If that sounds like you, or you'd like to help in another role, I'd love to speak with you.

Our current stack includes Ruby on Rails, iOS / Swift, .NET / C#, Javascript/CSS/HTML, and React Native.

https://www.blackcombsoftware.com/jobs

Blackcomb Software | Sarasota, FL Area | Full Time & Part Time | REMOTE , INTERNS

Blackcomb designs software to bring the multi-billion dollar HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), Plumbing, and Electrical industry into the next century. Our software and back office automation is being implemented at 3 of the largest HVAC companies in the US and we're continuing to develop new ways to transform this technologically ancient vertical.

- Full Stack Developer: We're primarily looking for someone with an eye for great user workflow design. We really appreciate people who understand what it takes to extend that to someone working in a sweltering attic to troubleshoot a customer's urgent issues. On the web front end, we're mainly vanilla JS and evaluating a switch to React / Redux. On the back end, we work with the .NET stack in C# (MVC, WebAPI, SQL, LINQ, Azure). Experience with Swift and iOS is a plus. If replacing cruft and repetitive tasks with smart software gets you as excited as we do, let us know you're interested: https://www.blackcombsoftware.com/jobs

- Customer Communication Designer: We think communication with homeowners is an extremely important and often overlooked aspect of of a well run HVAC company. We want to keep homeowners up to date and informed about the work being performed at their homes. To do that, we place an emphasis on generating timely, informative, and visually appealing communications. These communications go out in print and digitally through emails. If you've ever been frustrated by a lack of actionable and timely information from a service provider and know you could design something better, let us know: https://www.blackcombsoftware.com/jobs

Blackcomb Software | Sarasota, FL Area | Full Time | REMOTE , INTERNS

Blackcomb designs software for the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) industry. Our software and back office automation is being implemented at 3 of the largest HVAC companies in the US and we're continuing to develop new ways to transform this technologically ancient industry. We're primarily looking for people familiar with the .NET stack in C# (MVC, WebAPI, SQL, LINQ, Azure, Javascript), but experience with Swift on iOS is a big plus. If replacing cruft and repetitive tasks with smart software gets you as excited as it does us, let us know you're interested: https://www.blackcombsoftware.com/jobs

Blackcomb Software | Sarasota, FL Area | Full Time | REMOTE , INTERNS | Full-Stack Engineer

Blackcomb designs software for the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) industry. Our software and back office automation are being implemented at several of the largest HVAC companies in the US and we're continuing to develop new ways to transform this technologically ancient industry. We're primarily looking for people familiar with the .NET stack in C# (MVC, WebAPI, SQL, LINQ, Azure, Javascript). If replacing cruft and repetitive tasks with smart software gets you as excited as it does us, let us know you're interested: https://www.blackcombsoftware.com/jobs