[zbrozek]

Yeah, in the past I tunneled everything through a VPS. These days I no longer bother, but I'm also getting service via a small ISP. It's a co-op and I got voted onto the board, so I have reasonable confidence against shenanigans.

[peterangular]

Yep - VPS tunneling usually through nginx is how I get around it for my use cases.

Cheers on the co-op ISP - that's outstanding and I wish more places did that. In so many ways that's living the dream!

[Brian_K_White]

I've certainly dreamed of a co-op / credit union isp.

I think in absolute numbers there are a lot of people who would value that, but only one or two people in any given area, so no way to service them. (Not considering sattelite for both bandwidth and latency reasons.)

A long time ago I was in some newsgroup or irc channnel and someone from Russia I think it was, was just casually describing their internet connection like it was normal but it was blowing my mind, which was basically some kind of totally home grown adhoc very local lash-up where they had 100M cat5 ethernet right to their appartment and strung between a few neighboring buildings. It wasn't clear who operated or provided the uplink but the switches and last bits of cat5 were just done by the local residents. No real "isp" like a US individual subscribing directly and individually from Comcast etc. Presumably there was some sort of co-op arrangement to share the cost of the actual shared connection.

I don't know at the time the idea of just running your own cat5 among a neighborhoods worth of buildings and getting way way WAY better service than what I could get paying even hundreds of $ as an individual residential consumer just blew my mind. Surely in the US some code inspector or other government official would come along and declare the cables illegal on some pretext or another, and surely the isp would call it some sort of theft or abuse.

[bombcar]

You can do something similar in the US - many condos have it setup where they technically are an ISP and pay for transit.

Usually it's not worth it because you end up doing end-user support for every neighbor and people are dumb as rocks. But you'd be surprised how cheap a "very fast" transit internet connection can be.

[chihuahua]

I agree with what you're saying about support. I get nauseous just thinking about the number of people who call their ISP just because their laptop has a flaky Wifi module, and the thought of having to deal with that.

[Brian_K_White]

fact