Los Altos Hills residents co-own their last-mile fiber after Comcast quoted $210,000

Per Ars Technica's 2022 report, Sasha Zbrozek moved to Los Altos Hills in December 2019 after Comcast told him by phone that service was available. It was not: after more than a year Comcast, via the town's public works director, quoted $210,000 ($300 a foot over about 700 feet of trenching). Comcast told Ars the quote reflected the town's underground-construction rule, hard asphalt and road restoration. AT&T's quote, for conduits the neighbourhood would install itself, ran $28,000 to $44,000 per home, according to Zbrozek.

He instead joined Los Altos Hills Community Fiber (LAHCF), a co-op ISP built with Next Level Networks, a company that builds and manages networks for local groups. In Next Level's model, as its founder described it in 2020, the community owns the last-mile infrastructure and members own the drops to their homes. Volunteers find areas for expansion and recruit users; once enough people join, Next Level finalises the design, secures permits, oversees construction and then manages operations. The network is open access, so multiple ISPs can serve over the same fiber.

Zbrozek spotted a second lever: a private road behind his house was being repaved, so he proposed burying conduit during the repaving and connecting it to the co-op. His fiber went live in January 2021, passing 22 homes of which about 17 signed up. Each paid roughly $12,000 up front plus a $155 monthly service fee; construction ran about $50 a foot.

Fiber to a house is expensive mainly because of trenching, and a repaving job already open to the sky removes much of that cost.

Owning the drops and conduit means residents are not locked to one provider, since the network is open access.

Volunteers recruiting neighbours replaces the sales effort a commercial ISP would have to pay for, and contractor operation keeps service professional.

Quotes from the incumbents (about $210,000 for one house from Comcast, $28,000 to $44,000 per home from AT&T) set a high alternative to beat.

When an incumbent will not serve the last mile, let users own that piece and hire the expertise, so demand aggregation costs volunteers, not capital.

By October 2022 LAHCF had about 4.5 miles of fiber with two more miles under construction, around 50 subscribing households, and a board president expecting 300 subscribers within a year (his projection). Users interviewed by Ars reported far faster uploads and fewer slowdowns than on AT&T; one Ars-quoted resident said the $155 monthly fee was higher than he would like. Backhaul was leased from Crown Castle and Zayo.