Two Brothers Built Their Own Internet Service

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Two Brothers Built Their Own Internet Service
Provider on the Roof of a Supermarket in
Brooklyn
By Matt Putrino
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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 that
the 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 their
neighbors sit offline and stew. No, Rob and Eric Veksler did what most angry, disconnected
customers 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 use
to hook up their neighborhood to a fast, reliable internet connection. The company’s
name, 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 up
being one of the biggest changes to the way we access the Internet in New York in a decade.
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Louis CK has a bit about cell phone users who complain about their smartphones: The gist is
that the technology is amazing, and unless you can build your own cell phone network you
can’t say you hate Verizon. As I climbed atop the famed Brooklyn food market, I couldn't help
but think, at least by Louis's standard, Eric Veskler has earned the right to say whatever he
wants.
ARCHIVES
(/blog/skyping-santa-pooping-
logs-blackface-elves-the-holidays-are-awful)
Skyping Santa,
Pooping Logs,
Indeed, Brooklyn Fiber’s main link runs out of
the top of the Fairway building. It provides the
lion’s share of their bandwidth, and is
comprised of a series of cylindrical white
transmitters, each one about the size of a
pineapple. They’re mounted in a few
inconspicuous locations around a manicured
roof deck (the floor above the grocery store is
residential). There’s a clear view of the Statue
of Liberty in one direction, and the entirety of
Red Hook is splayed out in the other. Right
now, Brooklyn Fiber has around 100
commercial accounts in Red Hook and a
handful of residential customers, most of which
live in the apartments above Fairway. Their lowest tier commercial plan costs $75 dollars
including taxes and a modem, five dollars cheaper than the lowest advertised price of Time
Warner’s Business Class (http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/businesshome/services/internet/broadband-internet-access/overview.html) service before taxes and
equipment rentals.
Before starting Brooklyn Fiber, one of Eric Veksler’s gigs was working IT at an advertising firm
in Manhattan. He did some wiring work on the side for a builder in Red Hook. After he had
started the broadband company and successfully tested the service, the builder was so
satisfied 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’t
we 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 hardest
hit 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 water
receded, 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 pair
set up mobile hot spots around the neighborhood so residents could get in touch with loved
ones and begin arranging for repairs. Keep in mind, at this point, the power was still out and
there wasn’t even cell service.
The network was certainly worth saving—it's among the fastest I've used in the city. To test the
speed, I went to the office of one of Brooklyn Fiber’s first clients, a real estate company with a
waterfront office in Red Hook. The first test was with streaming video on YouTube. I picked a
(/blog/crossdressingBlackface Elves:
The
Holidays Are Awful
(/blog/skypingcompression-and-colliders-the-first-photo-on-the-web)
santa-pooping-logsCrossdressing,
blackface-elves-theCompression
and
holidays-are-awful)
(/blog/rhino-horn-crisis-and-theColliders: The First
Photo on the Web
(/blog/crossdressingdarknet)
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Rhino Horn Crisis
colliders-the-firstand the Darknet
photo-on-the-web)
(/blog/rhino-horncrisis-and-thedarknet)
long video, set the resolution to 1080p, and it started instantly. I jumped around in the video and
it played without hiccups. The experience was more like playing a saved file rather than
streaming 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 clicked
though a dozen bookmarked sites, loaded TweetDeck and scrolled through ten timelines, and
logged into Gmail. Both Chrome and Safari offered similar speeds. I ran a few speed tests that
with results ranging from around 85-108
mbps 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 later
on 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 is
astounding. To borrow a Web 1.0 “Internet as highway” metaphor, 20 mbps on a typical ISP
network is like driving on a highway with a 65 MPH speed limit. There are roads, other
cars, traffic, and stop signs. Sometimes you might be able to go faster than 65 MPH, but with
delays you’ll be a few miles under on average. 20 mbps on Brooklyn Fiber is like flying above
the 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 customers
using the same bandwidth, but instead because of self-imposed regulations larger providers
place on high-bandwidth activity, like streaming a video on YouTube or Netflix. According
to Veksler, bigger ISPs make peering agreements with content providers that limit the amount
of bandwidth customers can use for specific services. He likens the situation to plumbing: if all
available bandwidth is the sewer system, then the big providers make a Netflix pipe or a
YouTube pipe that all traffic has to pass through.
But speed isn’t everything for an ISP. Considering that Brooklyn Fiber was created in response
to the unreliable service previously available in Red Hook, Veksler also maintains a remarkably
high uptime for his service. When asked about the last time he had an outage, Veksler cracks a
half-embarrassed smile when he explains that he temporarily disconnected about half of his
customers after he made a wiring mistake on one of his main transmitters last Spring. He says
he 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 out
of dealing with a big ISP. When you call Time Warner Cable’s phone system, a computer
checks your billing address on file, and if there’s a reported Internet outage near your home, a
polite voice informs you that technicians are working on it, and no one at their call center can
offer any more information. You’re then automatically disconnected. The experience of
reporting an outage to Brooklyn Fiber is closer to texting a friend for a ride than dealing with a
cable company. Veksler gives every customer his personal cell phone number. If there’s a
problem, 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 a
little surprising. Alternative ISPs usually provide service to rural farmlands
(http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rural-broadband-community-supportedinternet) or overlooked remote areas (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/watching-house-ofcards-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 state
of 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 one
provider 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 too
remote 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 usually
require huge government subsidies and can still cost residents hundreds of thousands of
dollars, not to mention years of construction (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/rural-broadbandcommunity-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 New
York’s digital infrastructure, it’s not a perfect system. The service is largely subject to the
problem of scale. With fewer than 200 total accounts, the personal customer
service Veksler offers is still realistic. It might not be impossible to maintain, say, 1,000
accounts with a team of engineers, but beyond that it's an open question how Brooklyn Fiber
can maintain its personal touch.
Tall buildings—which are more difficult to outfit—and topographic variations also eliminate huge
groups of potential customers for the Veskler brothers. But Eric is realistic about the role of his
service: 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 considerably
lower overhead than traditional methods.
Unfortunately, the company that regulates that service is also owned by the big telecoms. So
right now, Brooklyn Fiber is a hyperlocal solution. So much so that Veksler’s apartment, which
is just under two miles from the Fairway Building, is out of Brooklyn Fiber’s range. He still has
to get his own internet from one of the very ISPs that inspired him to start Brooklyn Fiber
whenever he's at home.
By Matt Putrino
1 day ago
Tags: DIY Internet (/tag/DIY+Internet), ISP (/tag/ISP), Internet (/tag/Internet), brooklyn (/tag/brooklyn), startups
(/tag/startups)
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