two brothers built their own internet service provider on the roof
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DIY INTERNET (/TAG/DIY+INTERNET)
Two Brothers Built Their Own Internet Service
Provider on the Roof of a Supermarket in
Brooklyn
By Matt Putrino
Red Hook's high speed internet starts here. Image Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/julesantonio/6787918284/sizes/z/)
There’s a distinct kind of rage that bubbles up whenever a cable company politely tells you thatthe soonest they can send a technician to fix your Internet connection is two weeks from now.Most of us know the feeling, but two brothers in Red Hook, Brooklyn, weren't content to let theirneighbors sit offline and stew. No, Rob and Eric Veksler did what most angry, disconnectedcustomers only dream about doing—they started their own internet company.
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Not a tech startup, or an e-commerce site, but a full-on internet service provider they could useto hook up their neighborhood to a fast, reliable internet connection. The company’sname, Brooklyn Fiber (http://bkfiber.com/), may sound like a brand of granola sold at Fairway,but what the Veksler brothers are doing on the roof of that same grocery store might end upbeing one of the biggest changes to the way we access the Internet in New York in a decade.
Louis CK has a bit about cell phone users who complain about their smartphones: The gist isthat the technology is amazing, and unless you can build your own cell phone network youcan’t say you hate Verizon. As I climbed atop the famed Brooklyn food market, I couldn't helpbut think, at least by Louis's standard, Eric Veskler has earned the right to say whatever hewants.
Indeed, Brooklyn Fiber’s main link runs out ofthe top of the Fairway building. It provides thelion’s share of their bandwidth, and iscomprised of a series of cylindrical whitetransmitters, each one about the size of apineapple. They’re mounted in a fewinconspicuous locations around a manicuredroof deck (the floor above the grocery store isresidential). There’s a clear view of the Statueof Liberty in one direction, and the entirety ofRed Hook is splayed out in the other. Rightnow, Brooklyn Fiber has around 100commercial accounts in Red Hook and ahandful of residential customers, most of whichlive in the apartments above Fairway. Their lowest tier commercial plan costs $75 dollarsincluding taxes and a modem, five dollars cheaper than the lowest advertised price of TimeWarner’s Business Class (http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/business-home/services/internet/broadband-internet-access/overview.html) service before taxes andequipment rentals.
Before starting Brooklyn Fiber, one of Eric Veksler’s gigs was working IT at an advertising firmin Manhattan. He did some wiring work on the side for a builder in Red Hook. After he hadstarted the broadband company and successfully tested the service, the builder was sosatisfied with the speed that he put Veksler in touch with nearly all of his commercial tenants.Almost every one of them signed up, and there hasn't been a single cancelation yet.
When I asked Veksler how he would describe the motivations of a typical customer—whether they were acting in protest against a cable company—his answer was simple: “Aren’twe all wronged by the cable companies?”
All of his clients were dissatisfied, he said, and he offered a solution that was cheaper, faster,and easier.
Last fall, the then two-year old company faced the biggest challenge an ISP can possibly face:a hurricane. Hurricane Sandy devastated Red Hook; the neighborhood was among the hardesthit in Brooklyn. Many of the waterfront buildings that housed Brooklyn Fiber’s customers,including Fairway itself, were left flooded and without power for weeks. When the waterreceded, the Veksler brothers brought their network back online with a newly designed system:they swapped car batteries to power the transmitters. After their network was back up, the pairset up mobile hot spots around the neighborhood so residents could get in touch with lovedones and begin arranging for repairs. Keep in mind, at this point, the power was still out andthere wasn’t even cell service.
The network was certainly worth saving—it's among the fastest I've used in the city. To test thespeed, I went to the office of one of Brooklyn Fiber’s first clients, a real estate company with awaterfront office in Red Hook. The first test was with streaming video on YouTube. I picked a
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long video, set the resolution to 1080p, and it started instantly. I jumped around in the video andit played without hiccups. The experience was more like playing a saved file rather thanstreaming a video.
Even at midday on a Wednesday with about 4 other people connected in the next room over,the service was much faster than the Time Warner connection in my apartment. I clickedthough a dozen bookmarked sites, loaded TweetDeck and scrolled through ten timelines, andlogged into Gmail. Both Chrome and Safari offered similar speeds. I ran a few speed tests thatwith results ranging from around 85-108mbps down, to about 37-83 mbps up, over double the advertised speeds of their highest tier(http://bkfiber.com/). When I experimented with the same streaming videos and bookmarks lateron at home, I felt there was now a noticeable lag.
What it's like to use Brooklyn Fiber.
The difference between 20 mbps on Brooklyn Fiber and 20 mbps on a major provider isastounding. To borrow a Web 1.0 “Internet as highway” metaphor, 20 mbps on a typical ISPnetwork is like driving on a highway with a 65 MPH speed limit. There are roads, othercars, traffic, and stop signs. Sometimes you might be able to go faster than 65 MPH, but withdelays you’ll be a few miles under on average. 20 mbps on Brooklyn Fiber is like flying abovethe same highway in a helicopter. No roads, no bumper-to-bumper, no traffic jams.
Those figurative delays with the telecoms aren’t because there is a bigger pool of customersusing the same bandwidth, but instead because of self-imposed regulations larger providersplace on high-bandwidth activity, like streaming a video on YouTube or Netflix. Accordingto Veksler, bigger ISPs make peering agreements with content providers that limit the amountof bandwidth customers can use for specific services. He likens the situation to plumbing: if allavailable bandwidth is the sewer system, then the big providers make a Netflix pipe or aYouTube pipe that all traffic has to pass through.
But speed isn’t everything for an ISP. Considering that Brooklyn Fiber was created in responseto the unreliable service previously available in Red Hook, Veksler also maintains a remarkablyhigh uptime for his service. When asked about the last time he had an outage, Veksler cracks ahalf-embarrassed smile when he explains that he temporarily disconnected about half of hiscustomers after he made a wiring mistake on one of his main transmitters last Spring. He sayshe was able to restore service to all of his customers in around 15 minutes.
Although his service is quicker, Veksler’s goal isn’t to beat Internet land speed records. Instead,he’s offering a net-neutral alternative to the big ISPs to take some of the day-to-day hassle outof dealing with a big ISP. When you call Time Warner Cable’s phone system, a computerchecks your billing address on file, and if there’s a reported Internet outage near your home, apolite voice informs you that technicians are working on it, and no one at their call center canoffer any more information. You’re then automatically disconnected. The experience ofreporting an outage to Brooklyn Fiber is closer to texting a friend for a ride than dealing with a
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cable company. Veksler gives every customer his personal cell phone number. If there’s aproblem, you simply text him and he drives over to your house to fix it. There’s no appointment,everything happens on the same day, and there's no automatic disconnect.
The emergence of an upstart broadband company in the most populated city in America is alittle surprising. Alternative ISPs usually provide service to rural farmlands(http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rural-broadband-community-supported-internet) or overlooked remote areas (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/watching-house-of-cards-from-across-the-digital-divide) that fall victim to the “the last mile is the most expensive”mentality of most major providers. Instead, Brooklyn Fiber exists because of the strange stateof broadband Internet in NYC: despite being the furthest place possible from rural farmland,much of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods and more industrial areas have spotty service and only oneprovider to choose from.
Unlike some of the remote and rural broadband networks, Brooklyn Fiber isn’t a mesh network.That is to say, it’s not a series of connected devices sharing bandwidth with one another.Instead, each customer connects directly to his transmitters. We’ve covered a few alternatives(http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-united-states-of-broadband) for people living in areas tooremote for traditional broadband. Solutions like satellite service(http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/greetings-from-the-far-side-of-the-wireless-divide), or rural,homegrown broadband have worked in the past, but the majority of those programs usuallyrequire huge government subsidies and can still cost residents hundreds of thousands ofdollars, not to mention years of construction (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rural-broadband-community-supported-internet). After only three years in business, almost no installation time,and a relatively small number of customers, Brooklyn Fiber is already profitable.
Veksler sounds positive about the future of Internet access in New York. While Brooklyn Fiber’s“point to point” is a quick and cost effective way to circumvent the red tape of altering NewYork’s digital infrastructure, it’s not a perfect system. The service is largely subject to theproblem of scale. With fewer than 200 total accounts, the personal customerservice Veksler offers is still realistic. It might not be impossible to maintain, say, 1,000accounts with a team of engineers, but beyond that it's an open question how Brooklyn Fibercan maintain its personal touch.
Tall buildings—which are more difficult to outfit—and topographic variations also eliminate hugegroups of potential customers for the Veskler brothers. But Eric is realistic about the role of hisservice: his goal is to eventually lay fiber optic cable to supplement his point to point access.He’s interested in a new way to lay fiber optic cable called “microtrenching” with considerablylower overhead than traditional methods.
Unfortunately, the company that regulates that service is also owned by the big telecoms. Soright now, Brooklyn Fiber is a hyperlocal solution. So much so that Veksler’s apartment, whichis just under two miles from the Fairway Building, is out of Brooklyn Fiber’s range. He still hasto get his own internet from one of the very ISPs that inspired him to start Brooklyn Fiberwhenever he's at home.
By Matt Putrino 1 day agoTags: DIY Internet (/tag/DIY+Internet), ISP (/tag/ISP), Internet (/tag/Internet), brooklyn (/tag/brooklyn), startups(/tag/startups)
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