[dataflow]

So they're leasing ("buying"?) fiber from the same ISPs they're trying to displace and relying on that payment to provide them with continued internet access? This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP, but something akin to an MVNO where they're at the mercy of the same companies they're competing with. I get the initial sale might seem fine, and the established ISPs might be fine with this as long as the company is small, but why wouldn't these companies shut them off (or raise the prices, etc.) when they grow too big to become dangerous?

[dboreham]

You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources. It's like saying that if you build a gas station and buy your gas from Exxon then that's bad because Exxon also operates gas stations. It's not like an MVNO where all you're doing is sending the customer a bill, and provisioning API requests to Verizon.

[dataflow]

> You're misunderstanding this market. There's a wholesale market, which he is buying from. There's a retail market which he is selling into. Some providers service both the wholesale and retail markets, but typically with different divisions, people, tech, resources.

The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen. It's not like the executives are oblivious to how much money each unit is making and whether another unit could make more in place of it. If you're the CEO and see you could charge twice as much by doing retail instead of wholesale then you'd obviously try to do that.

Rather, the explanations I'm getting from the other comments seems to be that (a) regulators require some kind of reasonable wholesale to exist to third parties, (b) the big ISPs aren't planning to serve those markets anyway, so they're not missing out on any income by taking money from the last-mile ISPs. And as long as those last-mile ISPs don't try to compete for the same customers then they're fine.

[fragmede]

> The difference in divisions/people/tech/resources doesn't explain anything for me. They're both the same company with the same CEO, whether it's one business unit or a dozen.

Then you've not worked in large B2B companies before. Eg Apple pays Google money and Google pays money to Apple, any perceived public rivalry goes out the window as far as business between the two is concerned.

If you're the CEO of Comcast, you've never even heard of this small time ISP, you have far bigger things to spend your time on, and the "upstream" business unit of Comcast really doesn't care what you're doing, so long as your money's green. It's all business. See also: Netflix using AWS despite Amazon having a streaming video service of their own.

[bombcar]

Because it's all business to them, and if they did it overtly they could get sued.

But also because once you're in a single location, you can pretty easily get multiple providers to that location for a Price, so there's really no point. Even small rural towns usually have multiple internet connections from different companies, and if they don't you can pay to run fiber if you really wanted to.

People find it hard to believe, but Comcast et al are actually businesses, not Satan's marketing department; and they happily take money even from "competitors".

[themoonisachees]

To expand on that:

Comcast would much rather sell a dedicated fiber to a business with capital and guarantees.

Selling to the individual consumer doesn't make a lot of sense business-wise, because of the deployment costs and continued support costs.

Comcast is also abusing their status as oligopoly to gouge costumers financially and qos-wise, but if they're selling to a business that buys large quantities and has staff who's job it is to handle network problems, they actually like that (right up until that business threatens to compete with them in areas where said oligopoly is in place, of course)

[haunter]

>This doesn't sound like a real first-class ISP

I'm not an expert but afaik you can't just be a Tier 1 network member https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

Even Tier 2 very limited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_2_network

In this guide's case yes you will be akin to an MVNO, you won't peer but just buying transit traffic. That's why most of these guides are also focusing on making the network wireless only (easier to build infrastructure)

[q3k]

You can lease fibre/lambda/L2 transport to an IXP (and there peer with other local ISPs and get global transit from Tier 1 providers) from many companies that don't even have any residential offering.

Or if (technically/financially/legally) possible, even run your own fibre to a PoP housing an IXP on your own.

Once you're in multiple PoPs and on multiple IXPs and with multiple upstreams/peers you're pretty much independent from the whims of a single ISP.

[mbreese]

Because there are different business units in the upstream company handling the dedicated access vs consumer sides. The dedicated business side have their own sales goals and if you compete with the consumer side, that’s not a problem for them. I’m sure there are some regulatory/anti competitive measures at play here too, but economically, the two sides of the business will act more or less independently.

[wins32767]

He's not trying to displace the majors. In rural areas, owning and maintaining a bunch of fiber to service less than a thousand customers isn't a business Comcast really wants to be in unless they get paid a ton for it.