The numbers are to be believed, I can tweet usage graphs aside from what's in the slides. 5Mbps per subscriber on average. Some pull as much as 20Mbps and the big peaks are when my kids download games. Customers could get that speed if they hard wired too but they don't.
My reading of this thread is hlieberman thinks your usage will eventually go up when (if?) people's habits change.
> I wonder if the utilization/customer is in part because of people's habits still being leftover from the WISP days. My ISP gives me ~950Mbit/s, and it's not unusual for my house to be using 70% of that with all the video streaming going on, especially in 2020. A couple of customers like me, your bandwidth rates are gonna start hurting really bad.
The child comment is questioning hlieberman's usage of over 600 Mbps, not your charts. I guess you could throttle users with some kind of QoS? Personally, I don't think data caps would help here. Thoughts?
It's pretty easy, I just sell myself an easement on the property for $1 before I sell to someone else. I can also just move the electronics somewhere else. The nice thing about fiber is the range, I can be within 25dB of here and it will still work. With average loss of 0.5dB/km that gives you a decent range
the issue with this approach is if you depend on it, it may just go away some day, either with the police called and if they track it back to you, you may be prosecuted under the laws that protect utilities. These are less forgiving than you might think.
It's a big deal to damage someone elses infrastructure, can result in bills and lawsuit to reclaim losses. If the pole owner notices, they may do something (or just ignore it). What you don't want is them tearing down your stuff without notice.
can confirm the shape of this assertion. Having a 10G even if rate-limited to something just over 1G gives the burst. When my son got a new laptop pre-school starting we could see those updates and game downloads on the graph, the other homes were just noise.
Are you saying you're going to recoup the value of your time in under 4 years, or would you just recoup the initial non-time investment in under 4 years?
It may sound like you might be spending something around 20 hours per week on this, if not more. If you bill your own time to your new ISP at market rate, when will you recoup the investment? Is that still 4 years?
To put some math into perspective, (20 hours/week * 4 weeks/month * 100 USD/hour) / 50 USD/month/customer = 160 customers -- that's how many customers you need to cover just your time alone, without considering any other expenses. The math should definitely work out given an adequate intake, but I think it's also easy to get lost in the community and tech part of it, forgetting the business case. Especially if you live in the middle of nowhere, without that many neighbours to sign up.
Even if Jared is spending 20 hours per week on this project now, that will not be the case after construction is finished.
As such your calculation does not hold and 160 customers will not be needed to recoup costs, cash or non-cash. There need only be enough customers to cover running expenses, administration costs and once off investment costs over time.
