I'm one of their customers. I often see that one green car parked down the road.
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
> Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
You've always had the _option_ of paying extra for unlimited data, however its only in the past month or two that they've started offering unlimited data as standard (in select markets).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
I’m sorry I still don’t get it. Could you explain that in different phrasing ?
A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
In markets where Comcast has actual real competition, they "include" the unlimited data (aka no cap) with no extra charge when you sign up for their gigabit plans.
You pay for their highest tiered and highest bandwidth plan and they have the audacity to impose a cap making that bandwidth work against you? Crazy. My household internet usage is quite modest, nothing anyone on HN would call data intensive—casual video streaming being the lion's share, and I blow out 1TB every month without fail.
In the Bay Area Comcast offered (2017-2023 at least) internet with a default 1-1.2TiB/mo data cap that you can lift for the month for an extra 10-20usd (I don't recall, my roommate who played CoD was the one paying for this by himself on every month with huge updates).
There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.
Really 10-20 more? When I asked, and I'm in the Bay Area, the unlimited plan was $5 a month more than it would cost if I leased their modem.
How much more was it than if you weren't leasing their modem?
It used to be 30/month for me. I was not renting their modem and got charged more for it.
If starlink ever gets more capacity, I'll probably switch. Right now I think the only way to get gigabit down on starlink is with four or five accounts and manually bonding the dishes together. As soon as that obstacle goes away, Comcast will have competition in my area and I intend take advantage of that.
That's not true. I tried getting unlimited data like 7-8 years ago and they said I needed a business account to get it.
What ISPs offer and how much they offer it for tends to vary wildly region to region.
If you live in a region where they have no meaningful competition (which is still fairly common in a lot of places in the US) well bend over and lube up.
They'll vary wildly, as much as they think they can get away with, in the hopes that you will never use the service and pay them as much as possible for it, and they'll bury your mailbox with crap to try to wear you down into coming back.
They will happily let you pay for years, for services that no longer exist, no longer connected to any of their networks. They'll take you to court rather than pay anything back; they know they are receiving extra money, and there's a significant amount that comes in, but "oh, it's so confusing, and there are so many legacy systems, we can't possibly catch every mistake."
The money they shuffle back and forth between each other, daily, reeks of book cooking - you might have a stretch of 20 miles of trunk in which there are 20 separate owners - not concurrent riding separate fiber lines, but in sequence, each paying rent to or getting rent paid by the adjacent rider, even though only a single company actually services the entire span.
It's funny how construction companies and ISPs get these rackets going, and then when people come along like these PrimeOne guys and offer a reasonable rate on a decent product, it's somehow vastly disruptive and threatening.
They'll expand, and be encouraged and allowed to expand, and after 5 or 6 years, the big ISPs will start circling, and eventually buy them out, and they'll retire happy. AT&T or Lumen will own their network inside of 10 years, and they'll claim it's modernized and upgraded infrastructure. People with shitty oversold undermaintained cable internet will be left alone until the money stops.
Starlink to phones is great, if it only didn't make ISPs so much money handling the base stations on the ground.
There's fiber all over the US just hanging there, unused, unmaintained, because merger after merger after merger left giant piles of assets under the ownership of companies like comcast and centurylink and at&t, who left infrastructure to rot, often built with public funding, and maintained their local monopolies and shitty service.
Whatever it is we're doing to regulate the industry at a federal level isn't working, but I imagine that's where a lot of the money goes.
A healthcare company I used to work for had a location in CA that, on paper, had 3 circuits - AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Each had their own Ciena box in their telecom closet. They were getting a circuit upgraded so one of them was newly installed and we needed to cut over the slowest one to an upgraded one.
Working with the director there, IIRC we traced down the Verizon and Comcast box as actually being connected to the AT&T box. After some checking of circuit IDs on boxes it seemed that the LEC for both the Verizon and Comcast circuits was AT&T, and AT&T was the actual owner of that single physical fiber going out there.
I wish I could sell the same thing 3 times, lol. Contracts were signed on all these circuits so there was no getting out of it.
Yeah they’ve offered unlimited for a few years now for an additional charge. Now as of last month all plans are unlimited if you just update to them. It wound up being cheaper for me too.
However I still applaud these guys. There needs to be more competition.
> I'm one of their customers. It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main reason is that any service that is not widely used will have gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's always the same handful of customers hitting problems or finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if something goes wrong with IPv4, it's going to be noticed very quickly.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP
How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.
On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring their existing or own wireless routers along and occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable. Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no modern replacements -- it's just not worth spending money to replace them when customers are going to migrate to fibre soon enough.
I don't think GP meant static addressing but literally, how many ask for IPv4 service? None, because you just provide it; it's an unstated expectation.
Now apply that to IPv6 and you can see the point that (I think) GP is making.
Side note: The claim it is not widely used doesn't track. How many people use Google or Facebook? More than half of that traffic is over IPv6.
https://circleid.com/posts/ipv6-usage-in-the-u.s-surpasses-5...
So when you said `ask for IPv6` you meant `ask for a static IPv6 prefix` or something else similar to a static IPv4 address? Or is this an apples to oranges comparison?
And then you say `Nobody asks for IPv4` - so nobody asks for IPv4 and 0.5% ask for IPv6?
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result.
Big, evil, hated Comcast has full ipv6, and I doubt any of its customers asked for it either. Instead people complain they’re only getting a /60.
Comcast was forced to go to IPv6 because they ran out of IPv4 addresses in the private address space to use for management of their network (think of how each and every cable modem needs a an address for management in addition to all the routers and CMTSes). I was a fly on the way inside one of the router vendors when this took place more than 15 years ago.
If you already have to do CGNAT, why not IPv6 as your core network with NAT64 at the border and 464XLAT on the CPE? It gives you best of both worlds.
I'm not doing CGNAT. We were able to get enough IPv4 addresses directly from ARIN a few years ago after being on the waiting list for a couple of years. It's a pity that widespread fraud depleted that pool faster than it should have been.
CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.
That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
Ah, okay, well if you already have the IPv4 address space available for all your customers that's a different story. I can understand why you want to wait to dual-stack in that case.
I do think NAT64/464XLAT is a pretty good architecture for new ISPs that can't get their hands on IPv4 space, though. Or even MAP-T, but CPE support isn't really there yet.
Android and iOS have pressure on app developers to support IPv6 or at the very least function on 464XLAT. On home broadband people could connect anything including programs that use literal IPv4 addresses and break on 464XLAT. Things like corporate VPNs, Skype, online gaming. Ironically these services would benefit the most from supporting IPv6 but they've evolved to deal with IPv4 NAT to the extent that they've become dependent on IPv4 connectivity.
For me, no IPv6 = no business. I don't think it's acceptable to build a network on IPv4 only at this point, it speaks to being willing to cut corners and not do things the right way just because it's easier.
I worked in this space for a while, in the US. Outside of the major cities, Internet service falls off extremely quickly. Like, shockingly so: you can be as close as fifty miles from, say Philly or Flagstaff and have zero fiber, zero cell coverage, just nothing.
The people who attempt to fill these gaps are commonly rural telephone companies, electric cooperatives, tribal entities, or mom and pop shops where the owner grew up on a Ditch Witch and only knows as much IP networking as essential to light up the fiber and get the packets flowing upstream.
They are enormously resource constrained in ways you might not expect, too, eg operations can grind to a halt because everyone is out with a chainsaw after a storm, or because the Guy that Knew Stuff about their network died suddenly.
They are very, very unlikely to decide to run an IPv6 network just because. There's no upside that makes the juice worth the squeeze for them.
In principle, IPv6 core networks can actually be very beneficial for small providers just starting out if they're not able to get IPv4 addresses for their customers and are forced to use CGNAT.
In an IPv4-only CGNAT setup, all the traffic has to flow through the CGNAT gateways, and that gear is stupidly expensive. Having IPv6 in the mix means that anything that supports IPv6 (such as most streaming services) won't hit the CGNAT gateway and can just be routed natively. This can really save money on CGNAT hardware.
For implementation, you can use NAT64/DNS64 for your CGNAT setup and implement 464XLAT on the CPE. This keeps your whole edge network IPv6-only so you don't have the complication of maintaining two parallel configurations on the edge.
There is also MAP-T, which is even lighter on infrastructure since it pushes all the state into the CPE and avoids the complication of stateful CGNAT. But unfortunately CPE support for it is pretty limited at the moment.
> Outside of the major cities, Internet service falls off extremely quickly.
Saline is less than 10 miles from Ann Arbor.
> The people who attempt to fill these gaps are commonly rural telephone companies, electric cooperatives, tribal entities, or mom and pop shops...
That's fair, but at some point, you need to recognize you are competing with a major ISP. No one appreciates it when you come in, tear up the roads, and then pull out once the incumbent ISPs bump up their speeds ever so slightly. (Looking at you, Google.)
> They are very, very unlikely to decide to run an IPv6 network just because.
No one deploys IPv6 "just because," and yet more than half of the traffic to major sites is IPv6.
> Outside of the major cities, Internet service falls off extremely quickly
I live half an hour from a state capital and my only option is cable... the coaxial cable they laid bare on my flower bed decades ago. I dig it up about every other year when planting. It's not even in a conduit!
I wish I could say no IPv6 no business. There are only 2 ISPs here, one cable and one fiber. Neither have IPv6, the smaller ISP also does CGNAT because IPs are expensive. I'm trying to convince them that they could save money with less powerful CGNAT hardware if they deploy dual stack.
I agree in principal but if the only other option is Charter/Spectrum/Comcast, you bet I'm going with the "lazy" person's fiber.
I have spent most of my career under the thumb of fucking cable and I'd sooner slam a car door on my nuts than go back to paying so much money for such garbage service.
"I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't."
Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with the no IPv6 in 2025?
I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there something systematic here?
Everybody can muddle along without IPv6, so it's easy to make it a very low priority. Especially for small shops that are struggling just to create a viable business. IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6.
We used to have freeipv6porn.com, lol. But I suspect that was a joke as much as anything else given how much porn you can get for free all over the Internet.
The eggs need some chickens first.
> IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6.
How about not having to pay for (as) beefy CG-NAT hardware because people that go to Youtube, Netflix, MetaFace, TikTok, etc, can directly connect via IPv6.
Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only. If you're still going to support ipv4 anyway, the hardware savings might not be too significant.
> Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only.
Even a small number of devices/services not supporting IPv6 can have huge costs:
> Our [American Indian] tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.
> We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from ROKU devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale(POS) equipment. So we cut ROKU some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.
* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...
* Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624
Sadly the post is now behind a login: what happened later was Apple donate a bunch of Apple TV devices to the tribal ISP and that cut their IPv4 usage by an order of magnitude (or some ridiculous number) and there were major savings. The ISP then recommended AppleTV to all of their customers to get the best viewing experience (because of the latency/overhead of CG-NAT when streaming video).
So the more you move over the more headroom you have for the broken IPv4-only systems. AIUI, the rollout of MAP-T/E has helped in that things are more stateless, and more work is done at the CPE, but there's still overhead.
Thankfully, they are doing IPv6, although one day I had some weird issue where IPv6 was broken but if I disabled it ipv4 was still working. Could have been my fault, IPv6 is generally new to me (not much of a network person).
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
Surprised they aren't deploying NAT64/DNS64 with 464XLAT on the CPE. You get essentially the same setup as CGNAT for IPv4 services but your whole core network is native IPv6 so you only have one set of address space to manage and your customers will be able to directly connect to anything IPv6 related.
How would you as a customer tell if they were?
Because you'd have native IPv6
Comcast has pretty good IPv6 support
since tailscale exists, why would you care about cgnat or even pay to escape it?
I'm not the only person connecting to my machines.
Some applications want to open ports and don't have the server-side infrastructure to punch a hole through NAT. Especially P2P apps and some games.
Sometimes I want to run a small, low-traffic web server from home.
Sometimes I'm connecting to my network from a machine that I don't control and can't install Tailscale on.
Tailscale uses the same range as CGNAT.
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/12829
You shouldn't be seeing the CGNAT addresses inside your home network, should you?
I'm on the other side of the country and was a Cox customer for over a decade until they decided to add a data cap to their plans. Fortunately, wyyred rolled into town right around the same time, offering fiber at higher speeds, no data caps, and half the cost. It was an easy decision. I also noticed that Cox is now advertising unlimited data for free. Too little too late.
> their provided router is locked down to hell
From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
> Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
Modem and ONT? I'm under the impression that there's nothing called a "modem" for fiber, and that the ONT serves a similar role. Am I confused?
No, that's my understanding as well.
My fiber installer referred to the Adtran 632V ONT he installed as the "modem".
He installed two other junction boxes (one outside the house near/under where the fiber attaches to the wall of the house, one inside near the ONT) but they're just passive optical couplers allowing them to swap out fiber segments in the event of fiber damage without re-running the entire install.
Can’t speak to this exact circumstance, but more generally: The ONT translates the SFP+ networking to fibre optic, but the modem is still somewhat necessary for logins if you use PPPoE as a wrapper for example. In telecom fibre optic, it often also assigns a particular vlan to internet packets and separate vlans for TV and phone. But I’m not an expert here, just explaining why I needed a modem function in my router as well as a media converter to house the ONT.
As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.
The component that does the PPPoE and VoIP VLAN is typically just referred to as a router (or a "residential gateway" for companies that want to sound less technical), I've never heard as it referred to as a modem, usually the ONT is referred to as a modem as it's MODulating/DEModulating the optical signal.
I wouldn't really call that a "modem" though, it's not really doing modulation/demodulation work to convert between media types. The terminology I usually hear for the provider's box handling any final authentication and VLAN splitting is usually a "residential gateway", which can be configured to bridge to a client's equipment.
Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.
their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat
So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
Comcast similarly removed their 1.2TB cap in my neighborhood within months of us getting fiber. It's almost like the only reason for the cap was because they could get away with it when there wasn't any competition.
Comcast is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any other real options. Just before Google Fiber was activated in my area, Comcast stepped up their game big time. The only problem is that they had spent years nickel and diming me for actual connection speeds that didn't even come close to their advertised rates, and their latency/jitter is garbage compared to fiber. Comcast clearly doesn't want to have to compete. In their defense, their connection was rarely down.
When I lived in downtown Oakland CA, Comcast literally could not keep up price-wise with the competition. Their customer service jaw would drop when I told them our local fiber offered a flat fee cheaper than theirs for 10 gigabit symmetrical fiber. On top of that there was another local microwave wireless option that wasn't too terrible.
The only thing in the end their salespeople could do was offer TV bundles but still wasn't cost-competitive. Not sure what their offerings are now but it was such an easy decision to switch.
> is notorious for exploiting places that don't have any other real options.
Isn’t this standard competitive practice ? Charge what the market will bear.
I don’t know if I’d call that “exploitation”. If there’s one gas station 90 miles from every other gas station in the Nevada desert, they’re gonna charge more, aren’t they?
Yes, it certainly is. But isn't it interesting that Comcast is almost universally hated? I used the word "exploit" simply because had they treated their customers better and focused on putting their best foot forward, I don't think they would have bled customers nearly as quickly.
That’s exactly it and they admitted it last week.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
> the only reason for the cap
Correct. It was a very calculated decision. They were squeezing out profits by trying to move heavy users to the next tier of service. But this only works if they have a monopoly.
Feature-wise it doesn't matter because you're still going to have to play the price haggling game. Other providers don't renegotiate every 6 months like they do. They have more in common with Waste Management than with a respectable ISP.
It was there 6 months ago, because when I moved and had to switch to comcast in 2021 I found out about the cap after ~5TB/mo
I vaguely remember reading something about their consolidating plans and simplifying pricing slightly. Part of that was eliminating the data cap.
This article couldn't have passed through my inbox more than 6 weeks or so ago so it is a very recent change.