"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

&gt; While the SLA says 100%, don&#x27;t expect perfection<p>When you have an SLA, understand what it is: a financial arrangement whereby you can request a prorated refund for certain types of outages. It is not in any way a guarantee on the part of a provider that you&#x27;ll experience even average uptime equaling or exceeding the SLA, just that they can pay out the fraction of customer requests for service credits they receive for the covered outages they have and still make money.<p>The reality for the type of service the author of this post purchased is that for any physical damage to the fiber plant, he will experience <i>hours</i> of outage while a splice crew locates and repairs the damage. Verizon might offer a 100% SLA, but they didn&#x27;t engineer it to even five nines of availability. That would require redundant equipment and service entrances at his premises along with path diversity end-to-end.

The ISP I own will give you dedicated if you desire. We charge an uplift for the installation (due to additional splicing) and a little bit more on the monthly price for the consumption of dedicated ports and cores rather than using the PON. However, as is the case with most provided services like this, the majority of the cost is covering the risk of the SLA. The likelihood of an outage is not too dissimilar to the likelihood of outage on PON, so really it becomes a financial and service guarantee more than an uptime guarantee. As a healthy middle ground, we will also offer BGP on regular services and we do a bit of a referral system with a couple of other friendly ISPs, who will also do BGP. I actually prefer multi homing to “dedicated” from a resilience perspective because it separates you from the entire network stack all the way to the transit and peering.

I know of only a few other people that have managed to get &quot;real&quot; fiber to the home.<p>I am jealous of them save for the &quot;your monthly ISP bill is similar to a car payment&quot; aspect.

Hey! That&#x27;s my setup as well! I have one DIA connection and a backup VPN over a shitty Comcast business connection that gets terminated in a nearby datacenter.<p>Getting an ISP to even _talk_ to me required quite a bit of sleuthing. And I was saying from the outset that I was ready to fully pay for the fiber run.<p>Apparently, ISPs in my locality actually divide the city into the service areas. How the heck this is legal, I don&#x27;t understand.<p>Some tidbits from me: my ISP installed a big honking ADVA optical line terminal on my premises. Getting them to move it to their side and just provide me with an SFP connection is still my work-in-progress.<p>The support is also outsourced into India, and getting them to understand what you want over the phone is... painful. Fortunately, the web ticket system is good enough.

This sounds like so much fun. Thank you to the author for writing this up and sharing the blow-by-blow.<p>While fascinated with the network stack, I&#x27;ve only gotten as deep as reading Illustrated TCP&#x2F;IP and pretending I understand tcpdump. I would love to rovel around in BGP and, um, all that jazz.<p>Any suggestions on how to get started? My vague understanding is that most people get apprenticed into this stuff through work. Are the relevant systems involved just too expensive and locked behind corporate walls to be amenable to autodidactism?

&gt; ISPs tend to oversubscribe these services as well (where you and your 10 neighbors might all be able to sign up for 1Gbps symmetric service, but not everyone can leverage that full 1Gbps at the same time).<p>How does this work for FTTH? I know nothing about fibre optic networks. I had the impression that each subscriber has their own wavelength, or rather a range of wavelengths that captures their bandwidth, and that does not overlap with other subscribers.<p>Otherwise I have no idea how passive optical networks could even work.

Verizon must make some killer margins on a connection once it’s up and running, given they’re willing to eat the cost of 4 employees and a police detail splicing fiber in manholes for a week.

Hard to believe his company was okay with paying for all of this, but neat! I’m jealous.

Very similar to the process I took getting DIA to a commercial building. They said they spent $60,000 pulling fiber half a mile through a business park (we didn’t pay this). We only have one ISP device in our rack (Verizon truly ships their org chart). We paid our contractor to have fiber installed from the DEMARC to the server room but apparently the ISP would’ve done that for free, oops.<p>And yeah the quality of customer service we’ve gotten from three different business providers has been exceptional. It’s crazy to have actual engineers you can call who know what’s going on. You get what you pay for.

Funny the author thinks this is a big deal. We do stuff like this to doctors homes a lot.

I’m astonished that Verizon didn’t charge separately for installation. Seems like it would take many years months of service to recoup the cost.

why not just colo a router at a dc near you and run ipsec or wireguard trunk to your home connection?

That was written by an investor. Weirdly... would make me more interested in them if I were someone who needed investment.