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Nick-W

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Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
This. It's insanely expensive, I'm unpaid and I've sunk about half a million into the network so far and 3+ years of work. We now have enough revenue to keep the lights on if I no longer support the company, but just barely so, and assumes zero growth and minimal support hours. I did this because it genuinely helps our community and the impact is directly visible and notable, but the economics are basically impossible, especially as a startup.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I can scale up our worker count as needed, but we keep it at a minimum since our Azure bills are already insane. Fun tidbit, there's a little counter on the bottom right which tracks live app circuits on the site, we were cracking thousands yesterday, normally it's ~5-10 at most. Did NOT anticipate having this kind of attention from a comment, and we were out climbing in Boulder Canyon when the bulk of the traffic hit the site.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I treat our subscribers how I want to be treated. I'm not a business person, I'm an engineer, I care about my privacy, and I love the EFF. Any company who wants to "buy our data" is going to get an emphatic middle finger, and our logging infrastructure is selective and highly amnesic where it needs to be. I mostly log ICMP & network control traffic (OSPF, BGP, etc) because that's the kind of data I do care about which is valuable in tracking down issues or service incidents. Also I always get prior permission and a very specific ~5-15 min time window from someone before we dump/analyze real traffic for a problem they're experiencing.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Honestly this is something I need to promote more. We've had a few people self-install which is amazing, and it turns a 4-8 hour install job into a 30 minute alignment one. It's something we can only offer to those who have an unambiguously clear line of sight to one of our access points though, and since we mostly operate in the mountains, trees can often make things very difficult.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
We can't, we're under NDAs for all of that stuff :(
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.

The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Probably hit it while the appservice was healing, amazed at the amount of traffic it got from being just a comment on hackernews.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
It's currently running on a single azure appworker, you might've hit it during a service autoheal/reset. There's a fair bit of overhead for every connection since it's designed for our subscribers to use and get realtime stats on their connection, was not expecting to get tens of thousands of hits by linking to it in a hacker news comment.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Totally - we're not advertising yet and usually only dealing with very local traffic at the moment, didn't expect to get tens of thousands of hits from linking to it from a hackernews comment!

The backend is an azure appservice running on a single low-spec worker at the moment, wasn't planning on enabling scaling before doing a hard-launch but here we are.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Anytime! Give me a call or send me a message, we're out at a crag now in Boulder Canyon taking advantage of the weather, so leave me a message if I don't answer and I'll get back to you asap.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Would love to. Honestly nobody has really shown any kind of technical interest in our network and we've been operating under the radar now for a few years. Now that I have some employees to help out, I might be ok with us becoming a little more known. We have had something between 400-500 install requests purely by word of mouth and without ever advertising anywhere, so I'm a little nervous for us to have a hard-launch, especially since we can technically serve a pretty good chunk of the city of Boulder (which has a population of 100k+).
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I run a small WISP - most of our new subscribers are coming from Starlink, but we are also cheaper and provide gigabit-class service.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Frontend is full blazor w/hybrid WASM, almost zero JS, all C#. Browser DOM is controlled by the app service in realtime, I plan on using this as a basis for our subscribers to be able to do live traffic & link stats monitoring, among other things.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
"Works for me, couldn't replicate". My place has 10gbps/10gbps service through my network but this is a quick test over 6ghz wifi: https://www.speedtest.net/result/17623249189
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Thanks! It's actually much less for the bandwidth-constrained, I use adaptive coding. If you have the bandwidth though...

That said, I know our page isn't particularly lightweight anyway, I've been pretty focused on expansion efforts and haven't had much time to update & work on the site.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.
Nick-W
·ปีที่แล้ว·discuss
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.