Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to My Neighbors
In this technical retrospective (2020), @troydavis shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 62 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 20 comments
Hey, it's Jared! I used to work with him at Akamai -- great guy. Definitely the kind of guy who would do something like this.
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.
Also, it looks like he's running the fibers directly to the house in a point-to-point arrangement? Or are there passive splitters along the way somewhere?
Have seen this on HN before but can’t find the link...
Very cool video, but it seems like a ton of work. I guess if you’re committed to never move and want fiber bad enough :)
Is there a link to some text that I could read. Listening to the spoken word, I tend to nod off after five minutes. Don't think I can manage 42 minutes :]
“I had an old ASN laying around that I was able to use for this project.”
Ah, yes, like you do.