<story><title>The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers</title><url>http://chrishacken.com/the-war-on-upstart-fiber-optic-internet-providers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>One of my secret fantasies is an &amp;quot;Uber for ISPs&amp;quot;.  That is where someone ignores all the laws, rules, and regulations, and just builds a fiber ISP without anyone&amp;#x27;s permission.  String fiber in through people&amp;#x27;s windows.  Instead of burying them, put them in those temporary cable trenches (that you see all the time for construction or film crews), or run them beside sidewalks and cover them with cement.  Hell, maybe a really sticky piece of duct tape is enough.&lt;p&gt;It would be totally illegal and you&amp;#x27;d probably go to prison forever if you started a company to do it.  And annoying people with scissors would be cutting them every day (not to mention glass-eating wasps! a real thing!).&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;d pay for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>I did this on a small scale in college!  Back then the only way to get internet was via dialup, unless you paid $300+ a month for a DSL line (which was about 5x the speed and always on).&lt;p&gt;Since my friends and I had all just moved into a brand new apartment building together, I picked up a spool of ethernet and some ends and we literally strung the wires from window to window (wireless was far too expensive).  The building was blue so I used blue wires and the owner either didn&amp;#x27;t notice or didn&amp;#x27;t care, because no one said a thing about it.&lt;p&gt;We all split the cost of the initial supplies and then everyone paid me whatever they could for the internet and I covered the rest.  We had 10 people and I ended up paying about $40&amp;#x2F;mo for it personally.&lt;p&gt;On the plus side, since I controlled the gateway (and old computer the University threw out) I could do fun stuff like traffic shaping and setting up a web server to be a bulletin board for us.  Also I got everyone to install one of those enterprise notification things on their Windows machines so we could send blast messages to each other about going to the city or down to the local cafe for dinner.&lt;p&gt;Good times.</text></comment>
<story><title>The War on Upstart Fiber Internet Providers</title><url>http://chrishacken.com/the-war-on-upstart-fiber-optic-internet-providers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>One of my secret fantasies is an &amp;quot;Uber for ISPs&amp;quot;.  That is where someone ignores all the laws, rules, and regulations, and just builds a fiber ISP without anyone&amp;#x27;s permission.  String fiber in through people&amp;#x27;s windows.  Instead of burying them, put them in those temporary cable trenches (that you see all the time for construction or film crews), or run them beside sidewalks and cover them with cement.  Hell, maybe a really sticky piece of duct tape is enough.&lt;p&gt;It would be totally illegal and you&amp;#x27;d probably go to prison forever if you started a company to do it.  And annoying people with scissors would be cutting them every day (not to mention glass-eating wasps! a real thing!).&lt;p&gt;But I&amp;#x27;d pay for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dublinben</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s pretty similar to how broadband developed in Romania, and a significant reason why they have some of the best Internet speeds in the world.[0] It&amp;#x27;s also more or less the model that successful community mesh networks have followed, like NYC mesh[1] and Guifi[2].&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Internet_in_Romania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Internet_in_Romania&lt;/a&gt;
[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;NYC_Mesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;NYC_Mesh&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Guifi.net&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Guifi.net&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>