Nick-W

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.

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.

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.

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.

We can't, we're under NDAs for all of that stuff :(

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.

Probably hit it while the appservice was healing, amazed at the amount of traffic it got from being just a comment on hackernews.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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+).

I run a small WISP - most of our new subscribers are coming from Starlink, but we are also cheaper and provide gigabit-class service.

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.