Two Guys Hated Using Comcast, So They Built Their Own Fiber ISP 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Samuel Herman and Alexander Baciu never liked using Comcast's cable broadband. Now, the residents of Saline, Michigan, operate a fiber Internet service provider that competes against Comcast in their neighborhoods and has ambitions to expand. "All throughout my life pretty much, I've had to deal with Xfinity's bullcrap, them not being able to handle the speeds that we need," Herman told Ars. "I lived in a house of 10. I have seven other brothers and sisters, and there's 10 of us in total with my parents." With all those kids using the Internet for school and other needs, "it just doesn't work out," he said. Herman was particularly frustrated with Comcast upload speeds, which are much slower than the cable service's download speeds. "Many times we would have to call Comcast and let them know our bandwidth was slowing down... then they would say, 'OK, we'll refresh the system.' So then it would work again for a week to two weeks, and then again we'd have the same issues," he said. Herman, now 25, got married in 2021 and started building his own house, and he tried to find another ISP to serve the property. He was familiar with local Internet service providers because he worked in construction for his father's company, which contracts with ISPs to build their networks. But no fiber ISP was looking to compete directly against Comcast where he lived, though Metronet and 123NET offer fiber elsewhere in the city, Herman said. He ended up paying Comcast $120 a month for gigabit download service with slower upload speeds. Baciu, who lives about a mile away from Herman, was also stuck with Comcast and was paying about the same amount for gigabit download speeds.
Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said.
Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.
Herman said he was the chief operating officer of his father's construction company and that he shifted the business "from doing just directional drilling to be a turnkey contractor for ISPs." Baciu, Herman's brother-in-law (having married Herman's oldest sister), was the chief construction officer. Fueled by their knowledge of the business and their dislike of Comcast, they founded a fiber ISP called Prime-One. Now, Herman is paying $80 a month to his own company for symmetrical gigabit service. Prime-One also offers 500Mbps for $75, 2Gbps for $95, and 5Gbps for $110. The first 30 days are free, and all plans have unlimited data and no contracts. "We are 100 percent fiber optic," Baciu told Ars. "Everything that we're doing is all underground. We're not doing aerial because we really want to protect the infrastructure and make sure we're having a reliable connection." Each customer's Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and other equipment is included in the service plan. Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router. They don't charge equipment or installation fees, Herman and Baciu said.
Prime-One began serving customers in January 2025, and Baciu said the network has been built to about 1,500 homes in Saline with about 75 miles of fiber installed. Prime-One intends to serve nearby towns as well, with the founders saying the plan is to serve 4,000 homes with the initial build and then expand further. [...] A bit more than 100 residents have bought service so far, they said. Herman said the company is looking to sign up about 30 percent of the homes in its network area to make a profit. "I feel fairly confident," Herman said, noting the number of customers who signed up with the initial construction not even halfway finished.
Weird trick. (Score:1)
Area men find a way to escape high broadband fees with this one weird trick..the results will shock you. ISPs hate them!
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So you get 1Gb/s on starlink ?
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Tops out at around 300 Mbps. But for what it is, Starlink is a very good deal with some caveats due to the technology. Tough to beat their their roaming package when compared to other providers, that's the area they really shine. But physical wires or fiber optics to a near by gateway are far more efficient than radio transmission to low Earth orbit. Starlink thrives in places with poor infrastructure and spread out populations, so shithole countries and fly over states.
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Sub 10ms pings to bitchute and truth social!
Great, but (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Great, but (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no technical reason for that if you are already doing the work of laying down fiber optic cables everywhere and using something like an xPON passive deployment, the hard part is getting the fibers everywhere. They can overload the switch at their endpoint sure but there's not too much incentive to do that, that's not where the majority of your costs are going.
This is also why I think it should be the default that your town/city/county/state should own those last mile fibers for the properties in their jurisdictions. It should only have to be done once and it makes no sense to have multiple fibers to homes or most businesses, about as much as it would with water or power connections. Once it's terminated at a place to connect to the internet the actual internet service can be done by an ISP, or that same entity or let the customer buy from multiple vendors. The people who own that fiber should only be concerned with maintaining it's integrity, makes no sense for a monopolistic corporation to own it.
The fact the fiber running to my house was placed there an owned by ATT is kinda fucked up. The service is good but I have to hope a second company installs a redundant fiber if I wanted to switch? Silliness.
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A single last mile fiber owned by the town is a single point of failure. When a stray excavator damages that, you'll have to wait until it is repaired; and the priorities of people responsible for dispatching the repair crew may not align with yours. (Case in point: In a pinch, I could go without hot water for a week, but an hour of Internet downtime drives me up the wall.)
When each ISP owns their fiber, they have the incentive to fix; and if one provider doesn't do that quick enough, you can have a fallbac
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Ehhh, i dunno if that happens enough to make doubling hundreds of thousands of man hours enough.
The municipal entity is also incentivized to repair your wire. Municipal water, electrical, phone and Internet services already successfully exist.
If you are a business yes you can get backups but every private home? No, unnecessary as a base level service.
Re:Great, but (Score:5, Interesting)
Its not innevitable. Here in australia, we've had a similar small startup Aussie Broadband grow nationwide and they *still* are one of the most honest operators in the business. Hell , when I signed up during the covid downtime the lady on the phone was surprised I was out of work and an IT engineer so she ended up running around the company with my resume seeing if there where any openings there seeing as they had just built a datacenter in my hometown. There wasn't but I knew she had really done it cos I got a few phone calls from managers there asking me about my resume. Thats the kind of small-town thinking folks like about small providers, but this is now a nation wide company, one with *supreme* loyalty from the geek crew, and heres the kicker. Because all the australian geeks are now massive fans of the company, guess what they are recomending to the businesses they work for when "We need a better ISP" is uttered by the boss.
Network Issues (Score:2)
Willing to bet their issue was far more with 10 people using internet on a single consumer router at the time, than with the internet connection.
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I'm old enough to remember. I worked for Time Warner Cable and Comcast both about 20 years ago.
what about areas that underground does not work th (Score:2)
what about areas that underground does not work that well?
also how ready are they to repair if one of the big cables gets cut?
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New story, same old story (Score:2)
Re:New story, same old story (Score:4, Informative)
Oblig Futurama... (Score:2)
They Built Their Own Fiber ISP.
US Qwerst (Score:2)
Yeah, I can get 3/3Gbit now, or 10Gbit with Comqworst, which is more like 1.5kbs/2kbps on peak hours. Not great choices, T-Mobile has a horrible rate of like 1..5Gbs max but it is half the cost and beats both on throughput. Qworst, I mean US Worst, bought by ComQworst, I mean Q actually gets the best pings right now, 50-60ms, not 2-3s on peak hours for ComQworst. My experience is probably outdated, but god were they bad when I had them. Then again, the godawful almost outage with AWS was all on the Qworst s
Their plan works well in city, but rural ?? (Score:2)
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If the fibre is at the road that's just laziness and leaving money on the table. Let the customer pay for the work for the hookup, coming in with a trencher might cost too much to do it for free but it isn't that expensive either. They'd have plenty of customers.
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Also, trenching isn't done that much, directional drilling is the efficient thing nowadays.
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Can't you put small shack near the road and ask them to hook that up?
Re: Their plan works well in city, but rural ?? (Score:2)