'Anti-authority' tech rebels take on ISPs, connect NYC with cheap Wi-Fi
Actual ISP network engineer here: I&#x27;m sure these people are having fun and all, but it&#x27;s insignificant in the larger scheme of things.<p>(correction to original post: I did not at first see an ASN for them, or announcements of their own IP space. They have an ASN and announce two &#x2F;24s, and peer at one physical location in metro NYC).<p>Real five nines network infrastructure takes significant capital investment.<p>This part is so much unadulerated bullshit:<p>&quot;&quot;The internet doesn&#x27;t really cost you anything, it&#x27;s just the connection [that has a fee]. So however you can get plugged in — then you&#x27;re on the internet. Nobody owns the internet, there&#x27;s no one to pay.&quot;&quot;<p>Actual, reliable internet costs real money, both in the salaries of people to engineer and architect it, salaries for 24x7x365 clued-in NOC staff, equipment, salaries and expenses for field technicians to build it. And that&#x27;s before you get into things like establishing colo at major IX points, serious core routers that cost $15k each (do you really want to deploy something in the year 2018 to take several full BGP tables that doesn&#x27;t have a 4 million FIB capacity?), etc. The Internet is a significant construction project at OSI layer 1, whether you&#x27;re putting PTP radios on rooftops, running aerial fiber, or underground fiber. Otherwise you&#x27;re just piggybacking on something that another, larger entity has already built.<p>I give them an A for enthusiasm and effort. It just needs to be channeled the right way so that they can figure out what it actually costs to run a reliable ISP. I&#x27;m all in favor of new startup ISPs.