<story><title>ISPs Say They Don’t Make Enough Money</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/big-lie-isps-are-spreading-state-legislatures-they-dont-make-enough-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zarath</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve never understood is how computers using one ISP connect with computers using another ISP. Is there some sort of law that requires that one ISP&amp;#x27;s cable must be able to interact with another ISP&amp;#x27;s cable? What incentive does someone, like say Comcast, have in allowing their users to interact with people using a smaller ISP like yours?</text></item><item><author>montasaurus</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s not a whole bunch you need to spend money on.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s of thousands of dollars range. Laying fiber is obviously a lot more expensive, but not really necessary in most circumstances.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re working on helping more people start ISPs-launching here on HN next week, but TechCrunch wrote about the project just now: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-individuals-get-their-own-local-isp-businesses-off-the-ground&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-indivi...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mcpherrinm</author><text>In general, every IP address is reachable from every other IP address on the internet.  This is possible because there&amp;#x27;s many BGP peering agreements between ISPs, and generally traffic is not filtered between them.  There&amp;#x27;s no law saying you can reach everybody else: that&amp;#x27;s just how the Internet works, because it&amp;#x27;s in everyone&amp;#x27;s business interests to make it work.  Very few websites are hosted using Comcast&amp;#x27;s internet service, so if Comcast didn&amp;#x27;t peer with anyone else, you couldn&amp;#x27;t get to many websites at all.&lt;p&gt;Comcast mostly provides service to end-users.  Comcast connects with larger backbone providers, like Level 3, NTT, Sprint and Cogent. Those providers sell access to other residential ISPs like Necto, but also to businesses, like website hosting companies, cloud providers, etc.  Comcast might directly connect to some bigger businesses like Google, CDNs, etc, for performance and cost-saving reasons.&lt;p&gt;The large (&amp;quot;Tier 1&amp;quot;) providers all peer with each other, and you can pay one of those ISPs to be able to reach the customers of all the others (this is called &amp;quot;Transit&amp;quot;).  So Comcast might connect to Level 3, and buy transit from them.  My ISP might connect to NTT, and buy transit from them.&lt;p&gt;When my computer sends a packet, it goes to my ISP.  They consult their routing table, and decide it&amp;#x27;s reachable over NTT.  NTT gets the packet, routes it through their network to a peering point with Level 3, who will then route that packet to Comcast, and finally to the end user.&lt;p&gt;Then some other random home ISP which pays for connectivity with NTT is reachable from my comcast connection.  The business relationship is not between Comcast and my ISP, but it&amp;#x27;s between Comcast and L3, L3 and NTT, and NTT and my ISP.&lt;p&gt;Thus Comcast would have to go out of their way to block connectivity.  Comcast wants to reach everyone on Level 3&amp;#x27;s network, because that&amp;#x27;s where the websites users want to connect to are.&lt;p&gt;This is largely simplified.  There&amp;#x27;s a lot of billing, politics, and technology issues involved here, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure I understand them all.</text></comment>
<story><title>ISPs Say They Don’t Make Enough Money</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/05/big-lie-isps-are-spreading-state-legislatures-they-dont-make-enough-money</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Zarath</author><text>One thing I&amp;#x27;ve never understood is how computers using one ISP connect with computers using another ISP. Is there some sort of law that requires that one ISP&amp;#x27;s cable must be able to interact with another ISP&amp;#x27;s cable? What incentive does someone, like say Comcast, have in allowing their users to interact with people using a smaller ISP like yours?</text></item><item><author>montasaurus</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s not a whole bunch you need to spend money on.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s of thousands of dollars range. Laying fiber is obviously a lot more expensive, but not really necessary in most circumstances.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re working on helping more people start ISPs-launching here on HN next week, but TechCrunch wrote about the project just now: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-individuals-get-their-own-local-isp-businesses-off-the-ground&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;techcrunch.com&amp;#x2F;2018&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;necto-looks-to-help-indivi...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>montasaurus</author><text>That gets into a really interesting aspect of how the internet works. It&amp;#x27;s not really one entity, the way people sometimes think about it. In reality, it&amp;#x27;s a bunch of interconnected networks owned by different people like you mentioned. How it works is that you buy something called &amp;quot;transit&amp;quot;, 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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s called Peering. Sometimes those peering agreements are settlement-free (no payments), and sometimes one network pays the other (like when you buy transit).</text></comment>