<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>equalunique</author><text>&amp;quot;Some cities &amp;#x2F; municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC?&lt;p&gt;Yet somehow, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have convinced most young people that FCC regulation of ISPs is a good idea.&lt;p&gt;The sad part is, the only thing between a mass of young voters and 1984-style internet is just 3 more years of Trump&amp;#x2F;Pai, who most of them hate. Hopefully the FTC&amp;#x27;s renewed authority over &amp;quot;information service&amp;quot; can be demonstrated for the virtue it is before it&amp;#x27;s too late.</text><parent_chain><item><author>maxsilver</author><text>&amp;gt; As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet).&lt;p&gt;Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It&amp;#x27;s actually really easy to do :&lt;p&gt;1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.&lt;p&gt;2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don&amp;#x27;t like this approach, it&amp;#x27;s very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it&amp;#x27;s much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)&lt;p&gt;3) Setup some light network management.&lt;p&gt;Some cities &amp;#x2F; municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.&lt;p&gt;The land between you and your customers is owned. You&amp;#x27;ll need space in public property (or &amp;#x27;right of way&amp;#x27;) to connect to them. This also varies based on city&amp;#x2F;county&amp;#x2F;state&amp;#x2F;local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can&amp;#x2F;can&amp;#x27;t be blocked, etc).&lt;p&gt;The only &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50&amp;#x2F;month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your &lt;i&gt;very first&lt;/i&gt; customer is somewhere north of $50k&amp;#x2F;each, and prices don&amp;#x27;t become reasonable until your in the thousands.&lt;p&gt;In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There&amp;#x27;s not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren&amp;#x27;t unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.</text></item><item><author>komali2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection.&lt;p&gt;So let&amp;#x27;s play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&amp;amp;T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque &amp;quot;plans.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise &amp;quot;unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to &amp;quot;plug into&amp;quot; it or whatever?&lt;p&gt;Hmm. I should see if there&amp;#x27;s some &amp;quot;How the Internet Works: for Dummies&amp;quot; book.</text></item><item><author>juris</author><text>This wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a problem if ISP&amp;#x27;s weren&amp;#x27;t de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP&amp;#x27;s kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors&amp;#x27; cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we should pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in this space. Comcast didn&amp;#x27;t realize it, but net neutrality was their own safety net.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/technology/net-neutrality-repeal-vote.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>onezerozeroone</author><text>Crowdsourceable? If you need a couple thousand users, would it be possible to run a marketing campaign, get pre-purchase commitments of $100-200, and give some rewards to early adopters? If you raise enough funding, you&amp;#x27;re good, if not, just cancel the campaign.</text><parent_chain><item><author>maxsilver</author><text>&amp;gt; As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet).&lt;p&gt;Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It&amp;#x27;s actually really easy to do :&lt;p&gt;1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.&lt;p&gt;2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don&amp;#x27;t like this approach, it&amp;#x27;s very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it&amp;#x27;s much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)&lt;p&gt;3) Setup some light network management.&lt;p&gt;Some cities &amp;#x2F; municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.&lt;p&gt;The land between you and your customers is owned. You&amp;#x27;ll need space in public property (or &amp;#x27;right of way&amp;#x27;) to connect to them. This also varies based on city&amp;#x2F;county&amp;#x2F;state&amp;#x2F;local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can&amp;#x2F;can&amp;#x27;t be blocked, etc).&lt;p&gt;The only &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50&amp;#x2F;month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your &lt;i&gt;very first&lt;/i&gt; customer is somewhere north of $50k&amp;#x2F;each, and prices don&amp;#x27;t become reasonable until your in the thousands.&lt;p&gt;In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There&amp;#x27;s not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren&amp;#x27;t unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.</text></item><item><author>komali2</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection.&lt;p&gt;So let&amp;#x27;s play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&amp;amp;T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque &amp;quot;plans.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise &amp;quot;unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service&amp;quot;?&lt;p&gt;As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to &amp;quot;plug into&amp;quot; it or whatever?&lt;p&gt;Hmm. I should see if there&amp;#x27;s some &amp;quot;How the Internet Works: for Dummies&amp;quot; book.</text></item><item><author>juris</author><text>This wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a problem if ISP&amp;#x27;s weren&amp;#x27;t de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP&amp;#x27;s kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors&amp;#x27; cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we should pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in this space. Comcast didn&amp;#x27;t realize it, but net neutrality was their own safety net.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/technology/net-neutrality-repeal-vote.html</url></story>