Comcast wanted $210,000 for Internet—so this man helped expand a co-op fiber ISP

Sasha Zbrozek lives in Los Altos Hills, California, which he describes as "a wealthy Silicon Valley town," in a house about five miles from Google's headquarters. But after moving in December 2019, Zbrozek says he learned that Comcast never wired his house—despite previously telling him it could offer Internet service at the address.

Today, Zbrozek is on the board of a co-op ISP called Los Altos Hills Community Fiber (LAHCF), which provides multi-gigabit fiber Internet to dozens of homes and has a plan to serve hundreds more. Town residents were able to form the ISP with the help of Next Level Networks, which isn't a traditional consumer broadband provider but a company that builds and manages networks for local groups.

Zbrozek's experience with Comcast led to him getting involved with LAHCF and organizing an expansion that brought 10Gbps symmetrical fiber to his house and others on nearby roads. Zbrozek described his experience to Ars in a phone interview and in emails.

"Before I bought my home, I checked with Comcast—by phone—to see if service was available at the address. They said yes. After moving in, I called to buy service. The technician came out and left a note saying that service was not available," he told us.

Want Comcast? That’ll be $210,000

There are five parcels that neighbor Zbrozek's property, and three of them have Comcast service, he said. Comcast's online availability checker indicated—correctly, as it turned out—that the house he was buying didn't have service. But it was clear that Comcast was serving the neighborhood, so he called the cable company to find out if he could get Internet access.

Zbrozek recalled a Comcast agent telling him the previous residents of the house he was buying never signed up for service and that "we might need to add a drop from the pole to your house, but, you know, otherwise it's no big deal."

Instead of it being no big deal, Zbrozek said it took over a year to get Comcast to tell him how much it would charge for a line extension to his house. Zbrozek eventually had to reach out to the Los Altos Hills town government to get a price quote from Comcast.

The answer was $210,000. Comcast wanted Zbrozek to pay $300 per foot to trench cable across about 700 feet, according to a February 2021 email from Los Altos Hills' public works director that Zbrozek shared with Ars.

While Zbrozek had calculated a distance of 167 feet from his property to the nearest pole with Comcast wires, he said Comcast told him the house was too far from the pole to legally provide above-ground service. Los Altos Hills requires underground installation in most cases.

Zbrozek also proposed connecting to Comcast by running a line to a neighbor's property that had Comcast service. "The closest point between my property and a (now former) neighbor with Comcast who would've let me do some private trenching is about 40 feet," Zbrozek told Ars. However, Comcast doesn't allow that type of property-to-property connection.

"The spirit of the franchise agreement [between Comcast and Los Altos Hills] is that I'm supposed to be able to get service because I'm on a public road, but in practice that just wasn't the case," he said. Before getting fiber service, Zbrozek and his wife, Stella, made do by "tethering to a cell phone. I just got an unlimited plan and plugged my cell phone into a home router and called it a day," he said.

Comcast blames complicated construction

Comcast told Ars there were several complications in serving Zbrozek's house. Those included the town's requirement for underground construction, the presence of "diamond rock asphalt" that necessitates special equipment to cut through, and the need to restore a recently paved road after installing cable. Comcast described this as "a very heavy asphalt grade that through time and sedimentary processes forms a diamond-type rock which requires a specialized bore tip or diamond blade to successfully penetrate through," especially at a depth of at least 24 inches. Comcast also said this type of asphalt is "often used on highways for a harder compaction durability and integrity."

Comcast and other cable companies don't allow the kind of property-to-property connection that Zbrozek proposed for a few reasons, Comcast told us. Sharing a connection between two or more homes can degrade service, the company said.

"There are also concerns with safety," Comcast said. "There are safety measures we take and implement to protect customers and their homes/property (in addition to our own employees) as a part of our installation that we can't guarantee if we don't do the work."

Comcast further cited the need to comply with regulations, pointing to a California law that governs the installation of underground cables. With cables installed by a homeowner, Comcast said it couldn't ensure that proper duct materials are used or that the trench is deep enough.

"This area was very complex, and we did review all angles thoroughly to find a less expensive solution," Comcast told Ars. Comcast also said it doesn't make a profit on the construction fees charged to residents who request line extensions—though anyone who pays for an extension ends up paying monthly service fees afterward.

"We serve the majority of homes in the Los Altos area, and the remaining homes that aren't connected are completed on a case-by-case basis," Comcast told us.

Getting involved in community ISP

Zbrozek, who is an electrical engineer for a company that makes self-driving boats, did not sit idly by while waiting for Comcast to determine how much it would cost to wire up his house. Though most of his immediate neighbors had Comcast service, other nearby roads weren't wired up, and Zbrozek spearheaded a fiber expansion.

"There's a street on the other side of my house that I don't live on but that butts up against my property... all of the folks who live on that road and an adjacent road were stuck basically with no broadband at all," Zbrozek told Ars.

This other street, a private road, was getting repaved. Zbrozek saw an opportunity to bury fiber conduits during the repaving and reached out to residents. "I was like, hey guys... I have this proposal. Why don't we bury some conduit in a few key locations" and "in parallel, reach out to this little fiber co-op that's forming in town and see if they can hook us into their network," Zbrozek said.

The plan worked, and Zbrozek got his fiber service connected in January 2021. The expansion brought fiber past 22 homes, and the people in about 17 of those signed up for service, he said.

Everyone hooked up during the expansion paid about $12,000 up front, and members are now paying a service fee of $155 a month, he said. Construction costs for burying conduit and fiber ended up being about $50 a foot, he said. "This is a little grassroots, co-op ISP that is happening basically because the incumbent ISP is not serving the area," Zbrozek said.

The neighborhood also got a price quote from AT&T before joining LAHCF. AT&T's offer was to install fiber "through conduits that we would have to install at our own cost," Zbrozek said. The conduits that AT&T required were larger and more expensive than what the neighborhood needed, he said. All told, it would have cost somewhere between $28,000 and $44,000 per home to go with AT&T.

"To AT&T's credit, they were quite responsive and easy to deal with, just expensive," Zbrozek said. AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.

The LAHCF network currently consists of fiber lines and point-to-point radio links to fill the gaps where no fiber has been installed yet. The community ISP plans to fill in the gaps with fiber as much as possible, making the radio links unnecessary in places, but "there will always be some radio link somewhere, since that jumpstarts growth," Zbrozek said.

“We can build you a network”

In a phone interview, Los Altos Hills Community Fiber Board President Scott Vanderlip told Ars about how the ISP was formed a few years ago. Vanderlip was part of an ad hoc technology committee for the town government, "and one of the projects we wanted to do was to bring better broadband to Los Altos Hills," he said. The committee sent "requests for proposals to almost every Internet provider we could think of: AT&T, Comcast, Sonic, and others," asking if they could provide gigabit Internet service, he said.

The group got a response from Next Level Networks. "They said, 'We can build you a localized, community-owned and operated fiber optic network, and we're willing to work with you," Vanderlip told Ars.

Next Level Networks takes care of network management and the hiring of construction crews to install fiber, Vanderlip said. Next Level also handles customer service. "Part of your monthly service cost goes to paying for your monthly support," he said.

The first few homes to get service were connected in April 2019. Los Altos Hills served as a test case for the Next Level Networks model, in which "the community owns the last-mile infrastructure" and "members own drops to their homes," Next Level Founder Darrell Gentry said in a 2020 interview with Broadband Breakfast. Volunteers who run each community network, like Vanderlip and Zbrozek, take the lead on finding areas for expansion and attracting users.

"Once a community has sufficient participation, we take care of the rest: finalizing the network design, securing permits, and providing construction oversight," Next Level Networks explains. "After construction is completed, Next Level professionally manages the network's operations on behalf of the community... The network design is 'open access,' which means that multiple ISPs can provide service across the fiber infrastructure."

4.5 miles of fiber so far

Vanderlip said LAHCF has about 4.5 miles of fiber installed in Los Altos Hills so far, and construction work for another two miles of fiber just started a couple weeks ago. For its backhaul connection to the Internet, the community group leased two fiber lines from two middle-mile providers, Crown Castle and Zayo.

Vanderlip said it was fortunate that those fiber lines for backhaul were available nearby and that they lead back "to Fremont, where we peer with Hurricane Electric and we can get sort of unlimited capacity and very affordable pricing."

Jay Snable, an LAHCF user who helped organize an expansion in his neighborhood, told Ars that he "really appreciated the community approach—owning the infrastructure ourselves and being able to choose different service providers if we are not satisfied."

Snable previously used AT&T fiber-to-the-node service, which was resold by Sonic. He then got his fiber-to-the-home hookup from LAHCF in June. Snable could have bought Comcast service but said he wanted to avoid "the Comcast world of contracts, less than stellar service reputation, etc."

The AT&T service often slowed down or stalled while streaming video or using video conferencing, he said. Those problems are gone now that he's on the co-op ISP's network.

"I blamed my internal network and Wi-Fi but now find it was virtually all the Internet connection," Snable told us. With LAHCF, "I can stream true HD on multiple devices with no issue now, and file transfer back to work is lightning quick." While there was one lengthy outage due to a fiber cut, "that sort of issue will be resolved over time with redundant circuits," he said. "It's still early, but the experience has exceeded my expectations to this point."

Jan Clayton, who organized the neighborhood expansion with Snable, told Ars that the community fiber connection "is more than an order of magnitude better than the service we had with AT&T. The AT&T upload speed was horrendously slow (3Mbps) and the entire service was unreliable, especially in the late afternoon and early evening. The LAHCF option is an incredible solution, and I believe that a few years from now, we will think that the investment was more than well worth it." Clayton said she and her husband "also wanted to support the adoption of the technology throughout our neighborhood, so we were happy to be early adopters."

The LAHCF model is quite different from another resident-built ISP we've written about a couple of times. Michigan resident Jared Mauch built his own ISP after being unable to get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast and is now expanding to hundreds of homes with government funding. Mauch's ISP is essentially a one-man business—he relies on contractors for some construction work but handles the network management and much of the fiber installation himself.

Sizable expansions expected

About 50 households are subscribed to LAHCF so far, Vanderlip said. With recent expansions, the network is "installed on streets that can access potentially hundreds of homes, so the capacity is built up to really serve a lot more homes," he said. Vanderlip said he expects the ISP to have 300 subscribers within a year.

LAHCF has mostly expanded into areas "that were just grossly underserved, and where the only option was either AT&T DSL or a boutique point-to-point wireless provider," Zbrozek said. But the demand isn't just from people without Comcast service.

"There are enough people with enough money who are unhappy enough with even functional Comcast service that we are seeing enough demand to expand into areas where we are [competing] head on" against established ISPs, Zbrozek said.

Crews recently extended the network "another mile and a half up the street next to me, mostly because there is a very wealthy CEO who is also fed up with Comcast who's paying for that network extension and allowing people along the way to join in," he said. (Zbrozek said he couldn't reveal the CEO's identity.)

Zbrozek said the $155 monthly fee is higher than he'd like, but "on the bright side, I have really good service now. Whereas by contrast, I would have paid Comcast $210,000 and then a $90 monthly fee, and I don't think I'm going to live long enough to make up that difference."

Vanderlip also got high quote from Comcast

Vanderlip started thinking about building an ISP after having an experience similar to Zbrozek's. Vanderlip told us that Comcast wouldn't provide him service without a hefty fee, even though "the guy across the street" has a Comcast connection.

"I can see it on the pole, basically about three poles away from me is a Comcast connection," Vanderlip said. But Comcast told him about five or six years ago that he'd have to pay $17,000 for a connection, before any monthly fees for Internet service, he said.

"To connect me for $17,000 just seemed outrageous considering it's literally right there on the pole, but that's sort of what they can get away with," he said. "That was one of the motivations since I'm the one who helped found the whole community project."

Vanderlip said he previously had AT&T U-verse Internet, getting about 17Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds. "What I got from AT&T was satisfactory, but I wanted to go faster," he said.

Monthly fee should drop as more users join

To access the network, most residents pay $5,000 to $10,000 upfront, depending on how much work is needed to wire up the home, Vanderlip said. The monthly service fee of $155 provides download and upload speeds of as high as 10Gbps.

"Once we have 100 subscribers, that should go down to $100 a month, and once we have 300 subscribers, that should go down to about $60 a month," Vanderlip said. The ISP has fixed costs, and "there's no profit here. We're a mutual benefit, not-for-profit organization," he said.

While the network connection is 10Gbps, the default in-home equipment provided to each subscriber tops out at 1Gbps. "Residents have the option to connect to our network at 10 gigabit capacity for the same monthly service price but must provide their own on premise equipment," a technical FAQ says.

When Los Altos Hills Community Fiber began, "we had five or six people put in the initial funding," Vanderlip said. "And then at my house, I was hosting the radios and all the routers and everything, so we didn't need any seed funding to get it started."

As the ISP grows, "each project is sort of independently funded," he said. "We only build in neighborhoods where they want us. With all the projects, before we lift a shovel, we give them project quotes." If the residents agree to the price and write the checks, "we go ahead and do the project," he said.

The co-op ISP uses what Vanderlip called a neighborhood champion program. Someone in a neighborhood that needs Internet service will "go out and talk to neighbors, and they do a lot of the footwork trying to organize projects. Then they come to us and say, 'OK, look, we want to connect; we've got 15 neighbors who are interested. Can you get us a quote for connecting us to your network?'"

Fiber islands

The co-op started providing service to a few homes by laying fiber in backyards and using point-to-point 10Gbps radios to fill in the gaps where there's no fiber. It took almost two years for the group to obtain a master access agreement with the town, which lets them install fiber underground in public rights of way, Vanderlip said.

They didn't finalize that agreement until September 2021, after the ISP was already operating. Fiber installation has accelerated since they gained access to public rights of way, Vanderlip said.

The 10Gbps radios will remain a critical part of the network until all the gaps are filled with fiber. In some neighborhoods, "they're not close to where we have fiber right now, but they really want it. So to speed them up, we came up with this concept called a fiber island," Vanderlip said.

The houses in each fiber-island neighborhood "are connected on a high-speed fiber optic network, and the backhaul component is—temporarily, until we get the true fiber connection to that neighborhood—is actually done with point-to-point 10-gigabit radios. So they're still getting a 10-gigabit connection," he said.

Radio links not a problem—power outages are

Zbrozek said he expects his area of the network to be on an all-fiber connection by late 2023, making the radio link unnecessary. But the wireless portion of the network hasn't been a problem.

A Los Altos Hills Community Fiber junction box.

Credit: Los Altos Hills Community Fiber

"Honestly, that point-to-point radio has been completely fine. The thing most important to us for reliability would be power," Zbrozek said, noting struggles with power company PG&E. "I don't know how familiar you are with our power utilities, but they're not the most robust... they're just not very good at actually keeping the power on."

The co-op ISP also needs upgrades in its own power backup, he said. "We've got battery backup in the network closets, but it's frankly just insufficient. We need to juice that up a bit," he said.

LAHCF designed the system to handle downtime of 12 hours or so, but "the hardware we chose for battery backup is grossly underperforming relative to its specification and, in practice, we get like two hours," he said.

Zbrozek told us about the battery problems when we first spoke in July. Since then, "we've swapped out some UPS hardware with better hardware in a couple of cabinets but are still not yet satisfied with overall power-outage tolerance, especially in the face of extremely dodgy PG&E uptime," he told us on October 1.