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DSL Hardware for Wiring Condos?
Condo-Netwerk asks: "I'm trying to prepare a proposal for my condo building to be our own DSL provider. With 160 units, we should be able to get a T1 and keep the price fairly low. But what's the up-front cost? Which hardware should we use? What do we need to know about Copper Mountain, Avidia, etc. to do our due diligence prior to selecting hardware? I'm also helping a friend spec cabling for a new 30-unit condo building he's putting up; he wants to pull cat5 and split a DSL line from the phone room to each unit. Caveats? Experiences? Is it better to use cat6 or fiber?"
Go wireless!
Here's my advice, for what it is worth:
1) Don't put DSL to each unit - pull CAT-5 and run Ethernet. Your residents will have a much easier time getting hardware than with DSL, and your costs will be less.
2) Pull the wire to a common router closet.
3) One port per unit
4) Lock down the ports that aren't being used.
5) Use DHCP to assign addresses.
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
10) Insist customers keep their machines virus free. Disconnect any who don't IMMEDIATELY.
11) Write into your rental contracts that you ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for maintaining your customer's machines or security - if they are scared let them run their own firewall.
12) Offer your own space, accessible to your users, with virus scanner updates, MS patches, and so on. Encourage them to use that to save bandwidth.
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Many will disagree with some of my points (esp. 7 and 9). Ask yourself this: do I enjoy being blacklisted for spamming?
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you can wire a T1 to you, why not just share that out?
BTW - What's up with the lack of the ability for logged in people to post AC??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Make sure you add a squid cache at the head end, you wouldn't want all your bandwidth being used up by constant goatse.cx reloads.
Trolling is a art,
Fiber everywhere. Or do it later.
I'm not sure why you would want to use DSL specifically?
If you are already going to be running cable through the complex, why not just build a 100bT network?
Why not just setup a bunch of wireless nodes?
Actually, at the camp I work at, they're building a big new building and wiring it all for internet access. My first response would be go wireless, but since that isn 't always feasible, I'd just say go the simple and tried and true route w/ cat 5. I mean...come on, can you go wrong with cat5?
The anti-salmon
Why not just regular old 10/100 networking? Why would you force everyone to get at DSL modem? It just doesn't seem to make sense to me. I guess I could understand the desire to keep everyone separate, but is it worth the extra cost? I wouldn't think so.
Oh, maybe first post?!?
copper mountain dslams are nice and cheap on sleazebay, and the modems are straight out of 3compton...
fo' scheezy...
Why not implement a wireless network?
Use IPsec or something similar to provide security and run a few drops to link the access points to wherever the telecom comes in the building.
Wireless seems to be the next big thing, and as standards change, it's far cheaper to replace a few transmitters can run new cable through a building.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you're going to be running Cat 5, why not use IT for the internet connection? It's much faster.
I also seriously doubt that one 1.5mbit T1 will be enough for 160 DSL connections. It's not even fast enough to support one DSL connection where I live; my 3.5mbit DSL connection, which sets me back about 35$ US per month, would be horribly slow if piped through a T1.
Now, I realize that most people don't have 3.5mbit. Everybody in eastern Canada (At least Quebec and Ontario) have access to 1mbit DSL (1.2mbit minus overhead). It'd only take two people to try to download at the same time to saturate your T1. What if 10 people tried to download? How much would YOU pay for a 150kbit internet connection?
I just saw a stack of Copper Mountain and Cisco DSL gear sell for 20 cents on the dollar.
Seriously - that's the first thing that came to mind.
If only 25% of people in your complex want the service, depending on which provider you're getting with, installation and continued service could be a shaky proposition.
Sig master! Sig master! Sig... faster?!
i would recommend looking into the Cisco 827 or SOHO 77 dsl routers. but if you just want to give the tenants access, then i would go with ethernet or wifi.
cat5 to each unit. a 100 base switch in each unit each segment to a switch in yout NOC closet that has the T1, the single cache,dhcp,and simply using one of the authentication systems used for wireless access points (the web based one comes to mind) you can shut off accounts for non pay /etc... coupled with a good firewall to the net and you are done...
make it web based administration and you are done.
why waste time with DSL or other crap like that?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Depending on the likely residents, I'd be a bit worried about sharing a T1 (1.5 Mbps) between 160 units. Even if you figure that at peak only 10% of the units are doing bandwidth-hungry operations (media streaming, large file downloads), that still leaves only around 100 kbps per unit, which is pretty bad. If 20% try for 'heavy' access at once, they'd be better off using dialup. In other words, 30 teenage kids or similarly high-bandwidth users could crater your entire scheme.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The costs involved with the hardware (tut systems) was pretty substantial. The owner of the property whent ahead with a MUCH simpler plan (I recommended) of putting a simple 24-port switch in the basement of each dwelling (24 room units) and daisy-chaining the switches together with 100MB fiber. We had to run CAT5 to each unit, but the costs of that (less than $100/drop) were cheaper than a TUT Systems client device (around $165) for each unit. In the end, we had one switch plugged into an upstream carrier. Turning on or off the units' internet access was as easy as telnetting to the switch and shutting down the port.
The 100MB was MORE than enough for the 1.5MB internet pipe, and as an added bonus the dwellings could game with each other on a true 100MB LAN!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
DSL was invented to provide a solution to a single specific problem (lack of quantity and quality of copper for long distance runs from the CO to the home). DSL makes some tradeoffs, including very expensive hardware, in most cases low upstream, and in many cases interference in the audio portion of the line that has to be filtered at each extension. If you're wiring an apartment or even a small neighborhood, why not consider pulling a second cat5/6 and providing regular 100mbit ethernet? Your cost dissolves down to a managed switch (and that can be eliminated if you're willing to manually plug/unplug ports from the switch), and the customer end becomes whatever cheap ethernet card they'd have to have anyway to plug the DSL modem in. For the fortune you save in DSLAMs and other expensive telco grade hardware you could probably buy everyone who posts a comment in this article a pizza.
-Dan
For new construction, run utp, fiber, and coax to each unit. This will reduce and future telco and catv headaches. Get the wiring done by qualified installers. Cat5 is not a type of cable, it is a standard, and few people know how to follow the standard. With 160 units you are going to need a lot bigger pipe than a T1. Also forget DSL, it's silly for on-premises connections. Just hook everyone up to the same 100 (or 1000) mbit ethernet segment.
Keep it simple, going DSL will increase the cost and complexity needlessly. Just use the T1 and set up the condos like a standard network: manage your router right, use a good proxy (for the cache), consider going 100bT, and keep an eye on the WAPs.
Do the maths.
1.5 mbs / 512kbs = 3
1.5 mbs/ 386kbs = 4
1.5 mbs/ 256kbs = 6 users.
And you wan't 160? Better get a T3 instead. more expensive, but 1500/160 is worse than a modem!
--
Go calculate something
Just use plain old twisted-pair Ethernet...
You will need more then 1 T1 for 160 units. You should get Multiple t1s from vendors and use a Cluster from nexland.com for high availability.
Don't use DSL, stay cat5 or Wireless.
I would look for Wireless ISPs. THey can offer: 1. Low cost 2. More bandwidth than T1 3. Quick installation (no waiting for the telco to hook up the T1). We use a wireless ISP and it has been very reliable. They install line-of-site equipment and the have a base station about 1/2 mile from us. The cost is 1/2 that of T1 and they can almost instantly increase our bandwidth to 10Mb/s -- try getting that through T1!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I know the nice guy who runs Telkonet Communications, and I think they have a good product. If you're condo runs three-phase power, it's a good possibility.
When Token Ring is the buzz word these days.
DSL doesn't seem like the best way, but then again, I have cat5 running throughout my house/duplex, down halls, stairs, under doors, to my room. I had to convince the gf that she just had to 'deal with it'. (she is a neat freak)
Dear Sir or Madam,
Installing a T1 are you? Sounds like you and your tenants will be downloading music that belongs to the corporations who pay my salary. That means you have to show me all the plans for installation and install network monitoring tools supplied by those same corporations that pay my salary and sue college students. Oh, and you can not have the source code.
Listen or pay the price,
Hillary Rosen
Stay away from the Avidia gear. What a nightmare. I thought they did an early EOL on it all by now, but if not then steer clear.
well if those condo's are all on the same grid you can use powerline technology to connect all of em up to 14mbps... thats all you would need for everyone to share a T1...
Here's the link
Hell, if you can co-operate w/ the CATV folks, drop a CMTS in the CATV head-end and provide cable modems to residents. I'm sure the units are pre-wired w/ coax. Then you don't have to worry about pulling cat5.
Bring in a T1 to begin with, possibly 2 from any given ISP. The CMTS can do your DHCP for you.
Check e-bay out - you can find some cheap-o CMTS's.
"How am I supposed to remember you, when you won't let me forget?" --Bare Naked Ladies
Anyway, the advantages of DSL should be obvious: no new cable needs to be laid. You can just install the DSL equipment at the central phone switch of the condos, and then give each resident a DSL modem. Much simpler, much cheaper.
But I agree -- a T1 isn't going to cut it for 160 heavy users. If you only expect moderate use, you might be able to squeak by. I'd combine multiple T1s (better redundency) or spring for a T3 (nominally cheaper per megabit). The choice is yours.
-Shylock
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
As for what I would do, don't go DSL unless you have to. DSL is only needed if you are really going over the limit of Ethernet and you want the rate limitiing built into most DSL boxes. It ain't like slapping in a Cisco router or your linux router in there.
The sizing should be in the 20 to 40 users per T1 and then you have to do load balancing between them - more fun and games.
And for your friend who is cabling his building project, he should put both CAT5+/6 and fiber. Only expect to use the copper for now but at only 50 bucks a unit to rough it in its worth it when you really want to do it.
CAT 5, not expensive, reliable. Fairly easy to run.
Do not use wireless, you will have to encrypt, and you can bet that the people accross the street will somehow bribe/con the key so they can share your bandwidth for free. With wire access is physically limited to where there is wire. DHCP, Squid, and a DNS server and away you go. A decent Pentium box will do it with Linux.
A T1 will probably be a bit slow during peak hours if you get enough people on it. You might start there but you will probably upgrade it later as more people sign on.
Go for it, great idea!
There's a lot of suggestions here about how to set up the network, but nobody seems to be covering the more difficult aspects.
How will you get the condo board to go for any such proposal. Chances are most people in your building don't know anything about networking and will be happy with their dial-ups...if they have internet access at all.
I'm finding it hard enough to get my condo to start a DVD library.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Say you throttle each unit to 128/128, that's gonna require a 20.5mb/s pipe. So you're better off getting a frac DS3. A 20m DS3 is about $10k/mo. So divide that by 160 units and it's gonna break down to about $62.50/mo per unit. The last I checked, you could get a 128/128 DSL line for about $30/mo. Doesn't seem cost effective to me.
Shit, my DSL is 3.5Mbs/800Kbs. I just upgraded from 1.2Mbs/160Kbs. Isn't a T1 a mere 1.5Mbs? You have 160 units... can you spell "over-subscribed"?
Why use DSL? Why not use ethernet? That way people within the building get 100mbit/sec connections to each other. Switches are dirt cheap these days (especialy compared to dslams) and if your building has good ducts it shouldnt be too hard pulling the cables.
I'm working on the planning stage for this same type of thing in my 88 unit complex.
An idea I have is to run wireless between the buildings in the complex and Cat5 inside each attic to drops for each unit. It wouldn't take very many wireless runs to connect all the buildings together. That would be nice. I would much rather run Cat5 to each building, but I doubt I can get the permission to do that kind of digging nor do I really want to dig. Hiring someone to do it would be too expensive.
Anyone know a good, cheap way to load balance?
My name fits again.
We're moving offices this month, and are having to change our DS1/T1 provider (Boston metro area). None of our quotes for a dedicated T1 (local loop + ISP charge) is higher than $960. Verizon is offering us $765/mo on a 3 year commitment. Our previous carrier offered us service for local loop charge + $150/mo. Our DS1 costs have halved in the last three years.
Get a T1/DS1 service over DSL. Better QoS, better care from the Telco if something breaks. If you need more bandwidth, bond a pair of DS1 or get a fractional DS3.
Wiring is the kind of thing best left to people who deal with it every day. I'd get a cabling company to give you a quote on running CAT5 to every unit and instaling a patch panel in some closet. They'll have the right tools to pull the cable, will be able to test it and will be responsible for fixing if anything isn't working.
I really wouldn't recommend pulling the cable yourself unless you really know what you're doing. BTW, depending on where it's pulled, it might need to be plenum or riser rated, and there may additional fire/code regulations for your area. You may need a license for cabling - but the cabling people would know all that.
grisha.org
As I understand it, the guy is talking about two different instances. in the fist, it's a 160 unit place that he doesn't want the expense, maintainence and overhead of running cat5 so he wants to use the existing phone lines and connect them to a dslam (being a DSL provider to tennants) then only pay for a dedicated pipeline. The other instance is another location all together that might run cat5.
I would suggest Frame Relay - because it's a shared pipe it's easier to increase/decrease bandwitdh then a T1 (usually your connection to the frame cloud is through a T1). It's also much cheaper too because it's not dedicated bandwidth.
Rather an innovative idea I think going the DSL route, especially looking on Ebay and seeing how cheap DSLAM's are...
You could always go with a leased line solution that will let you ramp up based on demand, then cat5e to closets on each floor, and then one jack in each apartment. That way when someone doesn't want it you pull their jack at the end of the hall. Use some sort of network monitoring tool to meter out bandwidth and make heavy users pay more..Also you probably want to avoid doing any mail hosting, or perhaps contracting with your connectivity provider for POP boxes...block all incoming ports or at least heavily restrict them. Also some sort of trigger to notify those machines that are sending suspicious traffic
It's amazing how far out of their way people will go to support Microsoft's crap. More than half of your list is Microsoft specific. Realize also that #10, " Insist customers keep their machines virus free. Disconnect any who don't IMMEDIATELY." eliminates the need for most of the other M$ virus precations, especially the silly M$ patch server which could get you a BSA visit. Why bother when you could recomend Linux or a Mac?
All small ISPs are going to be blacklisted by AOL/MSNBC regardless of how well or poorly you treat your users.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Why use DSL? Why not use ethernet?
You're comparing apples and baskets that hold them. DSL is a type of Internet connectivity, while Ethernet is a type of generic computer connectivity. DSL service is generally provided over Ethernet because today's networks are usually Ethernet. Ethernet can likewise be used for cable, printing, file-sharing, etc.
Ah, but a T1 is guarenteed bandwidth, and will have service level agreements in place.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My apartment complex is its own ISP. They installed ethernet in their buildings in 1996, starting with two T-1 lines.
With approximately 1000 total residents for all the buildings, this setup worked fairly well at first because not very many people had computers that were network-ready.
Around late 1999, the network began slowing down. A year later, streaming video was impossible, and by late 2001, I was better off using a dialup. It was BAD.
About a year ago, they added two more T-1s, and it's been smooth sailing since. There are about 400 people in my building, maybe 500 in the next, and 100 or so in the other places. The network is almost always fast. Obviously this is due to adding the extra bandwidth. One can assume that the user-base has reached its saturation by now (almost everyone has a computer with a NIC, since it's a student-oriented place), so they probably won't have any more speed problems.
They banned Kazaa and Morpheus, and apparently that helped. They don't give you an e-mail address or server space. They simply provide network connectivity. It's actually not a bad deal -- at $100/year, it's as fast an any cable modem or DSL connection.
I think two T-1s would probably be alright for only 160 units. And I might recommend Cat-5E wiring. We just rewired my work's building with about 500 data ports, using 5E. Everything is gigabit ready. Sure, 100-base-T is fast, but are you gonna want to rewire the whole damn place in five years when you want gig? Probably not. It cost us $120,000 for those 500 data ports and about 300 voice ports. Plan ahead!
Globe199
What's your Outage / backup strategy?
:)
You could run the entire block off a low-end Cisco router, but are you budgeting for a Cisco service contract and / or a 'hot spare' router?
How about line monitoring and alerts? Backups / service contracts for your switches? Environmental systems to keep your equipment closet nice and frosty? Factored in the electrical costs of that to your business plan?
Who's going to support the system? What do you do if a switch craps out at 3am? Running a community ISP can be fun, but it's *less* fun if you've not thought of these things before you start.
You may want to set up a Squid box as a caching proxy server. You can either tell everybody to use it, or set it up transparently - the former is simpler, but a few people may not use it, which makes it less effective for everybody. If you set it up transparently, some users might get annnoyed if they have any issues.
Remind everybody to use Shift-Reload (Netscape/Mozilla), Ctrl-Refresh (MSIE for Windows) or Option-Refresh (MSIE for Mac) if they have problems getting the most recent version of a page.
<plug type="shameless">Then you could install BannerFilter...</plug>
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I can understand why you'd want to use DSL - it saves pulling new wiring to each unit. Does HomePNA also work for you?
That's American for a flat...
I don't know where you live, but here in Dallas, you can get Airband for high speed internet to businesses, schools, condos, etc.
:)
Airband rocks. Their connection is never down and they have no wiring to you, it's all 100% wireless. They throw an antenna on your roof, you wire some ethernet to their box inside, and you've got their service.
In this situation (in this town) I'd get Airband with a decent bandwidth plan. You can either go wired by doing ethernet to each unit or you can go wireless. Personally I'd choose ethernet just for flexibility (i.e. the cards are cheaper than donuts and everyone has one at this point). Wireless is a good concept but expensive to introduce. Not sure if the residents want to fuel the convenience of wireless AND buy their own hardware to boot.
At any rate, if you can get Airband or a similar wireless service where you live, go for it. My friend and I were gaming with a 30 ping during a horrible thunderstorm that took out a power transformer a block away and cut the lights twice. Never dropped a packet.
The Capital expenses are not the issue. The hard thing about building a co-op service like this is maintaining the level of service over a period of years. Look around and creat a good board of governance. When you talk to others who have done this kind of project, you will see that the high prices isp's charge are not all that far out of line. Especially given that you may very well fall under local regulatory issues.
m l
For what it's worth:
0) You might find that pulling a pair of composit cables to each unit is very competative.
These allow you to run CAT5, Coax, fiber, etc in one pull.
For one example, see:
http://www.broadbandutopia.com/composite.ht
1) Bridged Ethernet to each unit.
2) Run with a CISCO bridging router and give each unit one dedicated port.
3) Sign up with two ISP's and run a pair of fractional T1's (one from each ISP).
4) Use OSPF well. (The hard part).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A condominium can be any sort of multi-family dwelling - a high-rise tower, five acres of two-unit side-by-sides or even an old remodeled warehouse. The thing that makes it a condo is that the units are purchased instead of rented.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I have to agree with several of the other posters. Wired is the way to go (if we are talking pre-construction for the building) for serveral reasons. Bandwidth - 160 wireless / secure nodes will not be able to compete with wire. Versatility - wireless is really still young. The options, speeds, and prices are changing overnight. With wire you will avoid locking in your tenents with a particular wireless technology. Future - wire every room in the house with RJ-45 outlets leading back to the utility closet of each condo. This will allow tenents to have their own internal LAN or not, plus they can make any jack "hot" if needed. Run one line from each condo to the central "hub rooms" allowing 10/100/1000 Mbit connectivity. I'm sure you can find 10 Mbit switches for cheap, and 10 Mbit service is better than pretty much any broadband around. VLAN all the condos maybe... I like the earlier comment about telling tenents security is their concern. Run everything through at least a cache, host your own dns, plus provide email service if you like. (Use at least a fractional DS-3.) Avoid fiber. There is fiber installed to the desktop where I work and it's a mess. Fiber is great for long distance, but stay cheap and easy to fix / troubleshoot and use copper.
Our Coop had load balanced T1's (2) for ca 160 connected units in 5 buildings. each building had a switch and Cat5 cabling to the apartments. I think the worst feature were the T1's which proved to be quite unreliable. Back then I investigated biz grade cable modems and load balancing SW. Turns out that you get way better performance for the buck using these than expensive T1's.
A bare IP service, isn't going to satisfy anybody but the most uber geek, who can run his own server. Which brings up bandwidth, TOS, and other problems.
Who is going deal with it when your netblock gets blackholed?
> Say you throttle each unit to 128/128,
> that's gonna require a 20.5mb/s pipe.
That's if you _guarantee_ 128kb/s per user.
Good luck finding a DSL provider that
*guarantees* 128/128 for anywhere near $30/mo.
You assume that all users won't be using
128kb/s simultaneously.
I'll agree that 1.544mb/s (1xT1) is a bit low for
160 units, but a 20mb/s DS3 is quite excessive.
IMHO, a couple load balanced T1's would be fine.
- blenderfish
You can run *THREE* Speakeasy 1.5M/386 ADSL
lines into the Complex, feed those out through
three wireless routers, and for a fraction of
the cost of a T1 you get much more incoming
bandwidth and the same outgoing.
Running cable is ridiculous for these bandwidths.
Not only is it expensive to install, it is expensive
to maintain.
Check out Dlink's site. You can wire the individual buildings with 10/100 and then use fiber to connect them to a central router for the T1. The prices are down in the range of reasonable for the switch that have 10/100 and a pair of fiber ports. You'd have plenty of speed and distance wouldn't be much of an issue.
I've always set Squid up as a transparent proxy, and used the firewall to redirect all port 80 through Squid (save for a few sites that don't like going throught a proxy).
www.eFax.com are spammers
My ISP offers an SLA. I choose not to buy it though.
I'll bet your condo already has cable run to all the rooms. DIY cable broadband might be much less trouble. For more info, try here
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
If he provides DSL to each unit he is going to be in the IT business anyway.
If he does it RIGHT, uses the RIGHT tool for the job (Ethernet and switches), rather than the WRONG tool (DSL and DSLAMS, which are more for WAN than LAN), then he has an easier job of it.
(Y'know, this 2 minute between posts is a real drag when you have a lively conversation like this... But oh well, the assholes make the rest of us pay the price....)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Huh? You don't know what you're talking about. DSL is usually provided over an ATM connection for one thing. DSL is not a type of Internet connectivity. It is a type of network connectivity, the Internet never has to be involved. Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol that can run over a variety of layer 1 media. Ethernet over fiber is probably about as versatile as you can get in an environment like this. Copper will work just as well and cheaper if the condos are close enough together.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I'll pay good money to see a story 5 minutes before all you non-subscribers and post my trolls! YES!!
no...
You're nothing; like me.
4) Lock down the ports that aren't being used.
What do you mean "not being used"? Not being used by whome, you? I suppose if someone wants to try something 'new' that comes out, they'll need to wait for the BOFH to bless it?
6) Set up your own caching server. I would recommend using Squid.
This should be optional. It'll help speed things up, but cache operators can make mistakes that can be very annoying for web designers.
7) Force all outbound port 25 (SMTP) through your mail server.
8) Run a virus scanner on your mail server. Scan all incoming AND outgoing mail.
I suppose simply filtering outbound mail won't cause any problems, but you shouldn't disallow incoming 25. People deserve to be able to run their own mail servers, as long as they aren't wide-open relays. A less totalitarian solution would be to use traffic shaping on 25 to prevent spamming.
9) Don't route the Microsoft file sharing ports or Apple Rendezvous ports between units.
Yeah, can't have file sharing between apartments! That would just be evil. LANs are not fun at all, and you wouldn't want to get in trouble with the RIAA!!!
13) Routinely sniff around for WAPs. Handle them as you see fit - disconnect, or verify they are set up sanely. Don't ignore them.
Yeah, just imagine if people used wifi to get around your file sharing restrictions!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Run cat5 if possible. Before you do that, I assume the condos have cat3 for phone? If so, how are they wired? It could be possible to use the existing cable to run on a 10 meg backbone, dirt cheap.
:
.11b wifi points for quick setup, rollouts to early adopters, and as backup gear
You also need to think of other possible options.
A big one, Voice over IP. With a 100 meg backbone in place, you could replace all the traditional phone service as well as providing internet.
(some legal issues here to look at though).
I'd implement it as follows
1. Do a SURVEY of interested tenants. Include VOIP as an option.
2. check Cat3 option, use it if possible.
3. Get some
when something fails... (it would really depend on how many IDF's you are going to place)
4. Plan your IDF locations carefully. Remember environmental and power factors.
5. Use the WIFI AP's to go from IDF to MDF on a temporary basis until you can rollout a fiber backbone.
6. Monitor and then put Rate-limiting into effect for the people who abuse the service, i.e. mp3's and warez out to the outside world.
7. Make clear service terms so the users know what to expect and what not to do.
8. Someone will have to monitor/troubleshoot this service. If you don't have someone, an option would be contract out with a Local ISP, or
perhaps a local computer consultant.
Finally, for those not interested in paying a monthly fee, offer LAN access for free, (to get them hooked as it were)
Without knowing more details the above is all I can give you. Hope it works out!
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
You say you want your condo building to be its own ISP. This sounds like an awful idea. A good ISP spends a huge amount of time answering questions from users who can't connect/can't read their email/want you to get the email they accidentally deleted/etc. Do you really want to spend your whole day doing this? If you don't, then you're going to be a bad ISP - one that ignores its customers and fixes broken stuff when it is convienient for the ISP, not when the customers want it.
So, either you are signing up to spend most of your day dealing with your neighbor's computer problems, or you are offering to give them a crappy ISP. Either way, I don't see much benefit. I'd say give it up, let the tenants choose their own ISP, and leave that work to somebody who is willing to do it as their full time job.
I did a 160 unit student housing complex about a year and a half ago. The place was already built and the network was an after thought. Luckily each unit had a phone jack wired with cat 5. We used two of the pair for network and the other two for phone. We had to splice the end at the phone box and run it back into the complex (Which was a pain in the rear). For hardware we got some pretty nice stuff for the time. Essentially there were 7 buildings, each building had it's own 24 port switch with a gig uplink back to a central building. We were lucky enough that the distance was within our limits for doing copper, since fiber is considerably more expensive (about 6-10x more expensive than copper). My suggestion is to run copper as much as possible, unless price isn't a problem. For internet access we ran multiple t1s to the complex, and was natted / cached using linux nat, qos, and squid for a transparent proxy. The same box also provided dns, dhcp, and email. The setup works flawlessly, we've just had a few users who have caused problems (where a managed switch system would have come in handy, but is more expensive also.)
I'm not a real doctor, but I recommend beer.
A lot of good posts about the hardware and connection, but don't forget your EULA. Some things to consider:
:-)
1) Have a good privacy policy
You may need to fall back on it if the authorities (or the RIAA) come knocking for your logs. If they badger you into turning them over without a court order, you could be in one of those stories about the criminals sueing because they got caught.
2) Look at the big ISP's agreements for ideas
You may see something you hadn't thought of.
3) Lawyers are much more cost effective when used to prevent you from being sue, rather than defend you after the fact. Think about having one draft or review your agreement.
Not trying to scare you, just make sure you're covered if the guy on the third floor turns out to be a pedophile, terrorist, or (gasp) file trader.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Check out www.travelnet.ca. They specialize in installing in installing DSL-like services in hotels and condos.
A company just wired my building in Washington DC. They charge $19.95 per month for DSL. Not bad for 1.5/384. Think they only provide service in buildings around the DC metropolitan area.
I meant thinK not thing! LOL
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phone company about T1 pricing. Get the T1 to a head in point, shoot it wireless, put repeaters in peoples attic.
You have now removed the wiring from trouble shooting issues.
Be smart, keep controls in place to prevent war driving.
Get an agreement people must sign that basically say "no spamming, you are responcible for what you do."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
DSL is a type of Internet connectivity, while Ethernet is a type of generic computer connectivity.
No, it's not.
DSL is just as much "general computer connectivity" as ethernet. Just because most providers use it solely for IP, doesn't mean that's all it can do.
DSL can be used to send anything - IP, IPX, Appletalk, whatever higher-level protocol you want.
This reminds me of a condominium development I was looking at in Toronto with some seriously cool high-tech toys. My friend's dad was one of the architects. Here's to hoping the market crashes soon and I can pick up one of their units. I think the same developers might have done a cool project in Vancouver as well.
in standard wall plugs with ether connectors, rca jacks, and power plugs, use a wireless access point for each building group. The local wire prevents you from having bleed over when 8 people all turn on their wireless stuff at the same time, as well as covering you in case some other great technology starts using the same frequency, not to mention when the idiot in 2b chanegs frequencies and can't fix it :) With each large condo unit on a wireless point you can manage remotely and control access via mac verification.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Obviously the technofreaks out there don't have a clue about cost or project management. You need to run DSL or HPNA to each condo for management and liability reduction (yeah, lets run ethernet so we can all sniff what our neighbors are surfing). With DSL (or we've had great luck with existing infrastructure running HPNA) you get complete control over who gets what type of bandwidth. The need to get a DSL or HPNA end-device will keep most of the moochers off your network. Let the condo owner decide how much bandwidth they want to pay for. As to one T1 line not being enough for 160 condo's, I'd put one in and see what your subscriber base is, you can always add another and split your user base by IP (another great reason to use a mini-DSLAM or HPNA Switch for distribution). Most companies run around 100-150 desktops on a single T1, so clamp streaming media and FTP to a reasonable level and most people will be happy. Ignore the Slashdot regulars (cat 6, fiber, WiFi - get real), they live in their own (mostly imaginary) world.
When people say 'I get 3.5 mb from my DSL' and 'a T1 isn't going to be enough', ask your self, do they know what they're talking about? We have a T1 (which I'm on right now) and for 100 users, we use a whopping 5% of it. Double that and you're at 10% - whoopie!
Sure you can get a line that rates at 3.5 mb, but what, besides P2P, does that really make go any faster? All my downloads max out well below the max rating for my line - both at home and at work.
Before we get into an argument about what is and isn't broadband, let's all agree that some research needs to be done before anyone decides if a T1 will be enough...
We have around 25 units and share a T1 over 10baseT. It's fine for now. But I would have gone Cat6 if I'd spec'd the job. Condo rental property depreciates over 27.5 years. That means the IRS expect the building to still stand in 30 years. You might wish you had put Cat6 in. Fiber isn't that expensive to add while you are at it (labor will be the big expense).
Since condos don't move around, I think wire will have a signalling advantage over wireless for the forseable future. If the laptops INSIDE the condos move around, let them go WAP, but link upstream over landline.
This sounds like a much simpler, sensible situation than DSL to each condo. Cat 5 is cheap, cat 6 is not expensive.
The consulting firm I worked for did similar installs for a large real estate company. Here's what we did:
1) Get a DS3 in a central building.
2) Install a linux based traffic shaping and mrtg box.
3) Split upload bandwidth evenly among tenants so nobody clogs up the pipe with porn servers.
4) Prioritize http and pop3 download traffic
5) Run fiber from the main building to each building in the complex.
6) Run the fiber into a fiber module in a switch in a closet in each building. From there, run cat5 to every apartment in that building.
7) Use DHCP to hand out a live class c.
8) Label all the wires and unplug people from the switch in their building if they don't subscribe.(Our setup was part of rent, so we didn't have to deal with this.)
9) Use MRTG to see who's using tons of upload and sniff their port. If they're doing anything horrible, have a talk with them. (You should make a comprehensive TOS agreement so you can disconnect spammers, kiddie porn servers, etc.)
10) Prioritize and uncap all bandwidth to your apartment, and enjoy.
If you are set on implementing DSL, Zyxel (www.zyxel.com) offers some DSLAMs that are completely IP based and connect directly to ethernet on the backside. The models are the IES-2000 and 3000. I'm not sure of the price point but it might be worth a look if it will simplify your instalation.
You don't know how to run an ISP, so you're going to try to force a building into becoming your captive customer base?
What's the advantage? Why would you want to raise everyone's condo fees? Don't you have an ISP around to do this stuff?
I would go with getting lots of WAP's. Run whatever cable/fiber you choose up the building in key places, and load the place with 802.11g WAP's.
Then sell access to the wap's.
The cards aren't that expensive... and if you buy in bulk, you can most likely get some sort of a discount.
It's compatible with any computer, and cheaper in the long run to upgrade. The WAP's can be easily switched or upgraded. And the only cabling is rather limited in length. it only links the WAP's together.
Installing a DSL system in your condo is hard, and I think it'll run you over $250k easily. That said, it's not impossible. We construct this stuff in our labs for test purposes. You need knowledge of ATM and IP routing. Unfortunately very few all IP systems exist, although that is certainly the future, unless your corporation is like mine and caters to telephone company monopolies (ILECs). server and to help your clients get configured. Given this, you need several pieces of equipment. We use a setup that looks basically like: add/drop mux for T1, to router, to DSLAM. You will want a "radius server" connected to that router I imagine, but I know nothing about those. You'll also need to make sure the line cards you get for the DSLAM are compatible with whatever CPE equipment (DSL modem) you plan to install. I recommend going with all ADSL (G.DMT) based stuff right now. Especially if you only have a single T1. Then you hook it all up, and spend a week or so learning how to configure the DSLAM and then the router. It's not easy, but not too hard if you know IP and ATM. Supporting this will be a little tricky... I'm legally bound not to discuss price, but this is a somewhat expensive solution that's going to cost you over $250k not to mention support. You might be able to get away with a standard ethernet installation and just forget DSL. Personally if I had the money you are planning to invest in DSL, I would instead think about fiber & ethernet. All my interaction with "new" data line installatinos indicates most people don't want the cost or mess of DSL, ATM, telco's and their vendors.
Consider that building this community network will inevitably place a few people within reach of information about their neighbors that they really shouldn't have, and will create a situation where the manager(s) of the network will be forced to perform some level of monitoring to further the common good (like traffic measurements by protocol).
When problems happen, and you know they will, won't it be fun to run next door and ask neighbor Jones to please stop downloading DVD rips of Girls Gone Wild(tm) since neighbor Smith is having trouble hearing the streaming audio from Jimmy Swaggart. When it comes time to distribute the cost of a bigger upstream pipe, will everyone pay based on their actual usage or will some people be underwriting their neighbor's Internet access?
I've noticed that most condo developments end up with about 10% freedom loving people, 80% sheep, and 10% neo-fascist busybodies that want to regulate what color flowers you grow in your kitchen window... which group do you think will volunteer for the "Network Usage Review Committee"???
[posted as an AC so my neighbors don't find out and disconnect me!]
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Not to complain folks, but haven't we seen this before, or am I at the office of the Department for Redundancy Department?On Topic: Go wireless. Nothing to pull, 11Mbps transmission rate, and as secure as your grandma's dentures. Woo!
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One thing not mentioned is ip addresses and NAT. Are you going to use NAT or will each unit have their own ip address?
If you go with NAT, how will this affect the users, especially the gamers? Will the hardware that you buy support multiple people using udp (ie. quake, counterstrike, etc) in a NAT configuration? I'm not a guru, but that would seem to be hard... not super-hard, but hard because you have 160 units connected. If several units are trying to play cs on the same server, can NAT actually solve this problem, since the traffic is udp? If it doesn't, will this generate a support call to you?
What about VPN (ie, pptp, or ipsec)? Some firewalls can only support one pptp VPN connection out, so you would probably want something smarter.... or do you disallow VPN? Then people who wanted to work from home won't be able to.
What about accountability? What if you are using NAT, and someone in a unit distributes kiddie porn, and the FBI comes knocking on your door. Will you be able to figure out who did it?
Like many other people have mentioned, support is the key.... if you advertise this internet connection, and it goes down, will you be liable for any losses? If some people work at home, and the connection drops, will there be someone around to debug the issue? Will the people who work from home be SOL? Is there's a problem with the T1 connection, you will still get the phone call, and you would have to phone the ISP....
I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but these are just some things to consider.
I'd just say go the simple and tried and true route w/ cat 5. I mean...come on, can you go wrong with cat5?
I agree totally with those suggesting using 100 Mbps Ethernet over Cat5. That's definitely the way to go. (Use DSL only if your condo is a subdivision rather than a building.)
One caveat: If the Cat5 is run in anything other than conduit - especially if it's run in an air duct - spring the extra bucks for "plenum" rated wire. In a fire the ordinary stuff may emit toxic gas. Plenum-rated wire is designed to retrofit old buildings by stringing it through the air ducts, and uses a more expensive plastic that does NOT emit toxic gas (or nowhere near as much) and also doesn't spread fire.
One other item: Check what your building's phone system is already wired with. There may already BE a 4-pair cat5 or cat5e to each unit. And if the phone company's demark point is the phone closet rather than the unit's phone junction box you folk OWN the wire. So if a unit has any two pair free you can use 'em and not have to string new stuff.
Note that 10/100 ethernet only uses two of the four pair in the bundle. Traditionally it's pair 2 (white/orange) and 3 (white/green), leaving 1 (white/blue) and 4 (white/brown) free for other things - such as a second ethernet drop, one or two phone lines, or power distribution to distant hubs and/or low-power equipment.
But the pair are all the same (except for the color code). So you can use any two pair for the ethernet feed, and sort it out at a junction at the far end. You can generally splice 'em if you're careful to keep the lengths of the two conductors in the pair equal and twist 'em back together afterward. (Don't sweat getting the twist rate to match exactly. Just avoid having a big untwisted gap with the wires hanging apart.)
Run one drop to the unit and have the unit's owner add a hub (or his own firewall machine) if he wants to run more than one box.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
BY GOD DO NOT DO IT.
You do not want ATM anywhere near your neighbourhood. You don't want all the complexity and diversity of various encapsulation protocols, you don't want all the ATM VC control crap, you don't want to fuck with the drivers trying to get them to allocate the buffers PROPERLY GOD DAMNIT, you don't want to find out that Conexant based modems lose 50% of packets in 1483 bridged mode for no apparent reason, you don't want to spend nights looking at AFE graphs trying to figure out why DMT wouldn't enter show time, you don't want - and I mean you really don't want to look for a decent god damn ADSL router like we do - because they simply DONT MAKE THOSE anymore, you don't want to spend your smoking breaks thinking about how you'd correct Zyxel developers' heads with a fire axe, and wanting to strangle Virata for using an OS that crashes each time you try to modify a configuration created from the web interface through the console.
You just don't want it.
You don't want any of it.
You don't want to be me.
Seriously, go wireless.
Coming from a telco that has recentlt gone into DSL in South Africa, there may be problems down the road with respect to supporting DSL lines within the building. Even though the distances are short, there are often funnies where a copper pair needs to be swapped out if a problem is taking too long to resolve (usually water in a joint somewhere, or a parallel AC power cable, or someone decided to call the phone company to fix their phone, phone techie kows nothing about this DSL setup and wires get moved/unplugged/rerouted etc.) You also don't want to be doing extensive infrastructure support if you can help it. If you go this route I would suggest getting a company in the business to support the infrastructure. You need specialised test equipment and experience often to diagnose problems, and those tests can come in at a whole amount of dollars. The hassles of supporting your own DSLAM/mini-DSLAM (exchange equipment) may be worth avoiding. 100MB Ethernet if you have the option is much less fussy about external interference, and is probably easier to maintain. You save the costs of individual DSL modems per customer and the setup of those. No DSLAM, just a good reliable Ethernet switch or two. You also need to decide if you want your users to go PPPoE or static routed connections. Static connections DHCP'ed with a pool of IP addresses is a lot less hassle and would be the way to go I'd think. If you want open access for everybody, then this is the easiest way to go. Users just have to turn their machines on and they're connected to the internet. With an open Internet T1, PPPoE will require you to do the PPPoE server and internet connection sharing, username and password administration. Good luck, your users will with any luck love you either way!
How about you give another proposal....to get someone that has a clue with networking. Using DSL for 160 apartments. I mean seriously.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the original plans for the existence of DSL involved -NOT- having to rewire.
If you're putting up a new building.. good for you.. wire cat-5 until your heart's content.
And yes, a T1 would be plenty for 160 units. Just ask your local telco what their overbooking ratios are.. probably similar.
Talk of putting in a fractional DS3 or multiple T1's is ludicrous... unless all 160 residents are telecommuting and 100% bona-fide geeks.
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This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Just put 10/100 ports in each condo and connect them all to a central switch and router. My apartment complex does this. They even have DHCP set up so all a user has to do is plug in and turn on and they're wired.
I assume everyone in the area has wired phone service? If so, try to get a deal with the local telco to access cable coming off their terminal that feeds the area.
The telco will fight you on this, but here is a way around it. Find a motivated salesperson with the telco. Point out to him that with access to the local loop you will be in a position to buy a T-1 from them (whereas they currently are not making any money from DSL etc) If you find the right guy/gal, they will help you through the process. You will still have to jump through hoops, but it wont be as bad with someone on your team. Then put your own DSLAM in place. This wont give you the bandwidth that fiber or 100mb ethernet would, but it will be cheap, and easy.
The other option is do fiber between the homes. This can get messy though. I'd probably use a mix of wired/wireless as it sounds like a low density project.
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After all, why do you need log files from a year ago (or even 2 weeks ago). Either you've fixed any problems the logs show, in which case you don't need them, or you haven't in which case, they'll show up in the next batch of logs.
Of course, you SHOULD save the entries that point out attacks on your system, but that's incoming traffic originating from outside, which should be dropped by your firewall anyway with a half-decent config file.
I only scanned the posts quickly so this may be a repeat suggestion:
The difference in costs between whether or not to use DSL or cat-5 ethernet will be determined by how easily you can purchase and run the cable.
If these are high end dwellings, residents will be much more particular about not seeing cable stapled to the moldings and ceilings of all the hallways.
HVAC units placed on the outside of the building sometimes provide plumbing chases that can be widened for extra cables
If you absolutely cant run new cable, or the distances make it unattractive, and no one wants WIFI, then DSL is the way to go.
The nice thing about DSL is that it will let you use all of the existing phone cable. The phone cable will need to all be brought to a single demark. At the telphone junction point the pairs are bridged to the DLSAM multiplexer. A modem will be required for each user to separate DSL from phone data. Phones in the DSL enabled dwellings will require filters on the telephones to remove the DSL noise and to keep the phones form killing the DSL carriers.
Consider doing a DirectTV multi dwelling unit installation while your at it.
Companies like Gatehouse http://www.gatehousenetworks.com/cable.html
can deliver a package of DirectTV programming to each condo using a single dish and at lower prices than the local cable company likely can. They will also provide financing and engineering for both video and data services.
Verizon also has Verizon Avenue that specializes in providing internet packages to condominiums.
id run fiber/cat5/6 to each unit and wire it up and those who dont want it or "forget" to pay get theyre cable unhooked from the office/phone room
6) Set up your own caching server.
For 160 units where less than half would probably even use the proposed internet access? Pointless waste of time.
7/8) As for the mail... hmmm... depends on if he really needs to go through the trouble of offering onsite email services anyways. Seems like a lot of BS trouble for a 160 unit condo where less than half will probably even use it. I'd sub-contract that to another ISP or the ISP he gets the T1, etc, from.
How do you think that DSL line costs $30/month for 128/128? The answer is they are oversubscribed by several times (typically ~5x for broadband, about 12x for dialup). No one does 1:1 badwidth, you could never make money on it and most of the time you would have huge amount of bandwidth sitting idle.
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If you set one up, post a webpage explaining what you did and how you did it with your new space when your finished!
Thanks!
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This is what I do for a living, so I think I'm qualified to answer for you.
First, you need to know if you have a central demarc or not. If all the phone pairs in your complex don't go to one central location, DSL is going to be a bad idea. If you have a central demarc, the job is easy. Throw a TUT systems expresso chassis in the telco room, (if you hook up all 160 units, you'll need two), plug it in to a router, plug the router in to the T-1. TUT is built to run over POTS, so you just jumper the lines over the phone pairs.
If you don't have a central demarc, things get more difficult. In that case, I'd suggest running a TUT mdu lite at each building (I'd need more information to know if this would be feasible or not), and then either trenching a cat5 backbone or running wireless shots to where you define your demarc for the T-1.
I don't really recommend wireless to the desktop in MDU (multi-dwelling unit) applications, since it's such a pain in the ass to get wireless signals to go through buildings reliably, having that many transmitters will give you rather serious problems with overlap, lots of stuff interferes with it, and the amount of money you'd spend on parts and labor to get the kind of saturation you'd need gets pretty cost-prohibitive.
If you want more information, feel free to e-mail me.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
And someone has to be responsible for paying the ISP connect charges.
;)
Are you going to factor it into association fees?
Or were you going to volunteer to handle it in GNUCash in your copious spare time
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We have our condos all wired with cat 5e individually pulled to every room (enough to do two phone lines and your ethernet to every room). We went through a third party group that took care of the wiring as the units were built and manages the connection for us... we basically have 150 units and one shared T1 line. We have a little box on the outside of each condo building with a little hub (you don't have to worry too much about bandwidth so go cheap - T1 is not going to give you gigabit speed!) with a lock to keep people out.
:) (And we get a discount on directtv for a large group as well)
For the most part, it is quite adequate - downloading the latest Matrix trailer or a couple mp3s can't be beat... in non peak (evenings and weekends) periods the bandwidth is quite plentiful. You will get the occasional abuser though (you'll want the ability to sniff out who is doing major downloading) and you'll also run into people misconfiguring their hardware so you'll get a rogue dhcp server or two going you have to track down (have to admit, my little linksys box got carried away one time!)
An added bonus is that with a T1 you usually get a bunch of static ip addresses available too, so those that have requested it in our complex have had their wish granted.
Overall, we pay $15 a month on our HOA dues for this access - pretty good deal. We are actually requesting (and we'll probably get it down the road) a second T1 line as well - as the costs come down it is even more economical. We also get directtv services through the same 3rd party - those that don't pay their hoa dues get their net and tv turned off - good incentive to keep people paid up too!
Where I work we have been doing this same sort of thing for Hotels. When we set them up we use a TUT system (http://www.tutsystems.com) for splitting it all up, a freebsd server, and a router. The nice thing about the tuts is you can internally enable or disable each individual port (apartment) on the tut system itself. With this sytem and how well it is working out, we keep getting more hotels as clients.
Just realise the reality of the situation..... There is no reality.
Do you really want your condo homeowners' association to be legally liable for the conduct of each of your subscribers? With all of the legal action we've heard about targetted at ISPs of late, I'd think this is an invitation to bankrupt your HOA. Personally, I wouldn't touch this proposal with a ten-foot pole...
Mine are very simple suggestions, and probably not exactly what you need, but I need to address some of the ideas being bongled about:
On the physical aspects
1. NO TO PULLING ETHERNET!
2. Cisco Long Reach Ethernet switches allow ethernet signaling over phone wire. Can supply 15Mbps over up to 1500 meters.
3. You can do DSL too
On the logical aspects
1. Only run a transparent proxy, and run it on openBSD
2. Do not worry about viruses.
3. Use a firewall. (You can make your own cisco PIX!) I can't find my links right now, but reply to this if you're interested and I'll find them and give them out.
4. Only supply a connection, the only services you should try to supply are what saves bandwidth like a transparent proxy.
5. How much do you want to spend on public IPv4? Would your tenants like rfc1918 privates?
OK, did that help at all?
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I think your best bet would be to get a wholesale/low-SLA T1, a used Router, a few 48 port stacks and just drop the Cat5/faceplates in each condo. The price is minimal.. And really unless your DSL provider's AUP allows you to share, if they cut your dsl for AUP violation, your going to have a lot of pissed off people.
Here in TX, you can get T1's for 150$/piece for the loop itself, then usually another 3-400$ for bandwith depending on who you go with. So let's say 600$/month for all you can eat wholesale T1.
According to Bell's calculations, they put up to 200 subscribers onto a T1 for DSL. Which is way over-subscribed but doable. Start with a Burstable T1 and go from there. Also what are you charging for this? If you decided to include it as an Add-on, at let's say: $45/month to absorbe your montly bandwith costs you only really need about 20 users. By the time you hit 100 you could easily have a DS3/T3 in there no problem, as they are even cheap depending on where you live.
First, forget DSL. It simply isn't reliable enough. Being out of connectivity is bad enough, having 100+ people mad at YOU because they're out of connectivity is even worse. Use a t1, multiple t1's, or a t3.
Here's the easy, cheap way to do it. Go over to ebay, buy yourself a Cisco 1720 with a Wic-1T-DSU card in it. Your t1 plugs into the WIC card, and ethernet port on the router plugs into your switch. You'll be able to do bandwidth limitting and port filtering as well.
From there, the only question left is the distance involved to the condos, which would dictate the structure of the ethernet design.
There are a few flaws with that design: First, with everyone on the same L2, there's no end to the mischief that someone can cause. Second, virii capable of exploiting the "network neighborhood" will spread like wildfire.
If you want to do things a bit better, put a firewall/router in each building, and wire those back to your central distribution switch. The "router" can be a $40 machine from the thrift store, with a couple of 4-port ethernet cards in them. Each ethernet port can be on it's own subnet, with appropriate firewalling on a *per port* basis. That will help you prevent lots of accidental and intentional problems that can crop up.
Of course, with 160 units, 1 t1 is pretty small. That only guarantees each unit about 10 kbits/second, which is lees than a 14.4 modem. Of course, not everyone is going to be on at the same time, but even if 1/10th of the people are on, that only guarantees them about 100 kbits/second.
When you also look at the fact that some people will use as much bandwidth as possible, then it gets even harrier. Let's say that you can each individual's bandwidth at 256k, with bursts to 512k. That means that it only takes 6 people downloading ISO's, using their favorite P2P app, watching streaming porn, or anything else to really make the connection suck for everyone.
Shop around, and see if you can get a good deal on a larger connection. Not long ago, I was offered a full DS3 (45 mbits/sec!) from Broadwing for $6k per month. While $40 per month might sound high on a per-unit basis, remember that would *guarantee* 768 kilobits per resident! There are very few places you can get that sort of *guaranteed* bandwidth for $40 per month *anywhere*.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Why not use LRE (LAN DSL)? Drop a T-1 into the condo add a Cisco router, LRE Switch (24 ports), Pots splitter and the CPEs to provide the resident access (this will be modular, so not everyone has to be signed up and going at once and you reduce your implementation expense). You lose all the wire running, wireless insecurity, gigabit and fibre expense. People will get their data service off of the same pair of wires as their phone service, they'll have a network to share files (if they so chose albeit at a reduced speed 3 - 5 MB). Everyones happy. You collect a nice phat pay check and or you are the local hero.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps 4916/index.html
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Why are you going DSL? This doesn't make sense to me. Rathe than DSL you should be looking at getting a T3 (forget a T1 it is puny) and then split that bandwidth among folks.
Here is what I would do: I would get the T3 and drop it into your switch room. I would then have a primary switch with 1000 Base-T. I would then divide the complex into zones such that a single switch can service all of the units in that zone. I would then run connections to each and every unit from the zone switch.
Of course, you want management in the switches, so that you can control how much bandwidth folks have. This would allow you to charge different rates based on the bandwidth allowance. For example, you could have a basic level of service built into the homeowner association dues, but let folk with a bigger appettite purchase more and more bandwidth. You will also want a firewall (I would look at the Netscreen) at your head-end to protect the whole thing.
Of course, this assumes that you are able to run lines into folks houses - it might not be as expensive as you think. But if that is a big cost, replace the switches with wireless base stations and it looks about the same. In fact, going wireless would have a lot of advantages and you might want to consider it. Of course, build it secure.
If you can run pure ethernet at a cheap cheap price than go for it. But if you want to utilize the existing copper I recommend checking out TUT Systems (www.tutsystems.com). Their expresso product line has been deployed in hotels, college campus, apartments, shopping malls. Their solution is cheap and reliable. With the combination of the expresso and sms platform you can deliver a true turnkey solution to the condo. Give them a shot.. I guarantee that the products are the cheapest on the block.
Who is gonna support/troubleshoot the computers/network for 160 apartments? Do you have that kind of time? Are they gonna pay for your time?
You have the chance to give yourself and your neighbors bandwith that does not suck. Instead you make it the equivalent of fast dial up plus custom M$ updater. You do this with DHCP (invented by M$?) and lock it up paranoid of M$ viruses. To do all this work, you need to buy filtering equipment to block ports and communications between units based on M$ usage of those ports. Bogus and all M$ inspired.
I count Items 7 through 13 as M$ inspired or fearing. Normal OS have well configured mail serers and don't need to have their trafic bothering the building mailserver. Normal OS don't need virus scanners or filters screwing up their mail and I'm unaware of a filter that works for anything but M$ binaries and VB. Blocking ports because M$ uses them for file sharing is about as dumb as not letting your neighbors share files in anyway they can. We know what machines will be disconected out of all proportion. If M$ were not so buggy, people would not be so afraid of the internet and their neighbors and you would not need to put a clause into the contract denying responsibility anymore than the electric company denies responsibility for light bulbs. Only someone from Redmond would recomend disonecting people's WAPs.
To configure your network in such a sucky M$ oriented way is an expensive, burdonsom endorsement of Microsoft crap. It wastes your money on equipment you don't need and it burdens reasonable users with restrictions. I'm not even going to imagine what kinds of calls you will get when M$ updater does not work, but I suppose you could bill to rebuild people's machines. I'd rather run a Debian mirror if anything. I don't mind billing time for software that works and respects it's users.
Thanks for being such a good shill. I like pointing out the advantages of free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But on ebay you could snag a DSLAM for your 160 units for under a grand. That's a DEAL. ebay search for DSLAM
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
i get a decated 1:1 128:128 connection, on isdn, and it cost me a bucketload, meaning £30 a month for the lines and £99 a month for the connect...that £129 a MONTH for a dedicated connection, i would love a 128k:128k for $70 a month lol, you lot dont know wht a real connection can cos 128 garanteed for $70 a good value
It's basically an apartment complex, except each dwelling is owned by an individual (instead of a company owning the whole shebang), who either lives there, or contracts out to the condo management company to find a tenant. Each owner pays fees to the management company to maintain the outside.
You won't get very fast. You'll need a T3 plus the costs of getting a T-line installed is EXPENSIVE.
But if the original poster has no idea what i'm talking about, then he either has no business doing the project, or needs to do research to figure it out.
As for the residents, a simple survey question such as : "would you like high speed internet with the following terms of use?" would do the job.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
I wouldn't go T1 for a 160-unit condo. T1 is just simply much too slow, giving you only 1.5mbit downstream. I would go with a DS3, although much more expensive, or a single OC wire. Sure, they will cost much more than a T1, but it would be much better than having say 30 people on a single T1 downloading anything at the same time. Even websurfing would be rather slow if enough people were using it at the same time.
Those who watch their backs meet death from the front.
Since I do this for a living I'll tell you the main things my company needs to look at (and we are technology agnostic... we want the best cheapest solution). Do all phone services for the building come into a single POE - Point of Entry, often called the M-POE? Is there riser cable from floor to floor? Is each condo home-runned? Do you have RJ12 (3 pair) cable or 4 pair cable (cat 3, 5 etc)? What's the distance from your wiring point to the furthest unit? Use a TDR test set. DSL ~15,000 feet. HPNA+ ~4000 feet. Ethernet ~300 feet. If you have 1 pair (free or not) and it is not a digital line you are pretty much stuck with DSL or HPNA+. DSL will be the most expensive (new). Check ebay for DSLAMs and modems. If you have 1 used pair and 1 free pair and the used pair is NOT a digital line you can use Ethernetsplit. If you have 2 free pairs you can use Ethernet tho you may see some interesting cross-talk. Even if you are bringing in a couple of DS-1's (MLPPP, IMA) use a managed 10bt Switch. For example the Nortel 310-24t ~$40.00/each. CPE Ethernet 10-50 HPNA+ 40-60 DSL 50-200 Installation Labor = $$$ Ethernet will require the most effort as you will have to terminate the in condo daisy chain (if that's how they did it which is likely) at the point you want to wire in the RJ45. HPNA+, DSL will be the quickest. Space and Power you'lled about 8U of rack space for that many units regardless of the solution. you *might* be able to wall mount if you distributed wiring points. Make sure you have good airflow in the locations you choose and limited or controlled access. Public or Private Addressing. You will have the least problems if you can do public addressing and then rely on the users to implement their own firewalls etc. Realize any computer directly connected to your network will in most cases be able to see any of the other computers directly connected (ie. not behind a firewall, or if you don't set up VLANS or use partitioning in your DSLAM. For 151 units you'll need a /24 or a /25 and a /26 with two different networks (multiple ethernet ports on your router).
Management
Make sure you set up ACL's for IP's that can manage your router or switches. SNMP and VLAN is good 'cause you can easily shut off service remotely for non-payment.
If you need some additional info feel free to contact me.
We've been putting in some new hotel/condo buildings lately. Specifically we've built 8 new ones comprised of 500+ units. We made the decision to pull composite cable everywhere. We chose 2 RG-5, 2 Cat 5, and 2 strands of fiber in each cable. We used Siemen's "Home Cabling System" for all the terminations. Good stuff.
As for your existing building, recabling will be expensive. If you're lucky there's riser closets on each floor where you could use the existing cable to pull with. You could also locate hubs there. But that's a lot of work. The idea of using some low bandwidth solution to the unit isn't too bad. Hardware costs will be really high, but you may be able to pass it along to the homeowner rather than eat it yourself. Yeah, it'd be nice to have ethernet everywhere but that just might not be possible.
As far as Cat6 and fiber go, generally installation and material costs aren't worth it. We justified it in our composite cable because it's cost wasn't as much. We didn't terminate it yet because so far there's nothing that will use it.
----- obSig
This is EXACTLY what QoS and traffic shaping is for. Throttle all P2P traffic to ~10kbps during peak usage and you're fine.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Distance is often a huge issue with MTUs. Remember that Cat5/Ethernet is great, but it can only go so far. If it's a larger building and your runs are going to exceed 100m, DSL may be the only option without installing switching closets everywhere.
As long as no residential units are more than 500 cable feet from the phone closet, HPNA 1.1 concentrators are the way to go (search google for 'HPNA concentrator'). The consumer hardware can be acquired for cheap; I've bought PCI HPNA 2.0 cards for $12 (searcn buy.com for 'phoneline')--and yes, I hear they work fine under Linux.
For new condo construction, stick with CAT5e (or CAT6). Fiber converters are clumsy, expensive, and unnecessary for consumer applications. If you want to add extras, go for a centralized patch panel in each unit so that residents can install a hub/switch/whatever.
As for the uplink, you'll probably want a business DSL contract (since that's sure to be cheaper than a T1) and make sure that they allow reselling of bandwidth. Alternatively, find someone who can supply you with bandwidth wirelessly. Make sure you establish a service level agreement with your ISP, especially if you are charging residents for the service.
I put together a similar plan for the 200-unit condo building I recently lived in, but the homeowners board wasn't very interested--probably because they were recently stung by a similar venture which burned thru about $50M in 2 years under the name 'Reflex Communications' before leaving their customers in the cold--so you can imagine that they were quite skeptical of a 20-something walking in the door saying he could do it for relatively cheap. Reflex supplied DSL-like service internally using Tut Systems equipment, and then used a wireless connection (probably an early form of 802.11) to link to a tall building several blocks away. They grew too fast, and seemed to have a knack for using the most expensive equipment they could find. Furthermore, I think they should have moved more quickly towards providing a ubiquitous always-on service instead of targeting the sexy high-bandwidth applications (like video-on-demand). For many homeowners boards, the thought of letting a unlicensed/unbonded hacker poke around in their phone closet is a little scary.
I have been wiring homes for high speed internet for about a year now and let me give a few bits of advice. First, you should wire everything with Cat6. Reason being is that a DSL or Cable connection today will be considered dialup in about 5 years with everyone having offsite storage, full frame rate video conferencing every where and highly networked lives. Verizon is starting a wireless service in Washington and San Diago later this year that should rival cabel speeds. My usual setup in a home is an 8port Gigabit router with a seperate firewall box and cat6 everywhere. Most home owners agree with the overkill setup because they also understand what it takes to rewire a house and this overkill also adds more to the appreciation of the home. The setup you are describing shouldn't be a problem. You should just realise that a T1 servicing 160 units will probably not be enough bandwidth i.e.:Downloads, streaming audio, gamers and outright bandwidth abusers. Which brings up another situation, you should track usage and charge more for those that like to download just a bit to much. Lets say that each resident pays $20 per month and everyone signs on - that's $3,200 which should easily pay for 4 T1 lines. Of course this doesn't account for the intitial install and, I don't think I have to remind you, your profit margin. Nobody likes working for free. Remember a few rules of intallation: make sure everyone understands fully what they are getting into and the possible problems that you may incounter also adding 5% to 10% onto the bid isn't a bad idea either. Good Luck.
The building where I live has 6 floors with 70 apartments. Every apartment has an ethernet jack. Each jack is wired straight to the main(only) network closet, where it goes through a hub, which connects to a dhcp server, and finally to a dsl modem. 1.5 Mbits, not too shabby, and it's free!
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Ah, yes, you're right. I've been out of the networking field long enough that the finer details are starting to slip... (no pun intended)
Still, depending on the layout of the condo site, I suspect that CAT5 or even CAT6 (though I don't really know what the CAT6 limits are) would be insufficient. A friend of mine just bought a condo in a large complex that's probably 20 acres in size with about ten units in each building. Wiring that with CAT5 only would be a nightmare.
In that situation, if you were going to stick with Ethernet (probably the best option), 10 or 100BASEFL between buildings would probably be the best bet.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
This doesn't pertain to whether you should use DSL or Ethernet, but rather is a few things I've always thought ISPs should do. (I've had this almost life-long goal of starting an ISP for some reason...)
I own a domain, and use it primarily for the unlimited mail aliases. Every site I go to gets sitename@mydomain.com, which just forwards to my main address. If they start spamming, I can tell exactly who it is, and redirect (or block entirely) the mail. Why not give each customer a subdomain (customer.condo.com) where they get, say, 5 POP boxes, but unlimited aliases? Used effectively, this could *really* fight spam. (This is venturing more offtopic, but Cpanel seems to be the most popular web-based control panel; you could provide customers with some webspace and e-mail access. It's easy to use, but even great for geeks. You can get licenses for like $40/month, or possibly less.)
Another thing I've always thought ISPs should offer was NAT access. Rather than getting an external IP, they'd get an internal one and use your proxy. It'd save you from needing as many IPs, and it gives them great security -- unless you go out of your way to set it up, no one can connect to them. Of course you shouldn't force this upon people, but some people might *want* NAT. Offer it as a 'privacy' plan. (Heh, you could probably even charge extra, lol)
Something like Squid could really speed things up, especially if you only have a T1.
The last "If I ran an ISP..." item regards DNS. Maybe it's because Adelphia is so crappy (they have like 5 DNS servers, and whatever you have as primary ALWAYS goes down, so you're re-ordering the nameservers several times a week to make it work at all...), but I ended up using OpenNIC, which essentially is a 'democratic' TLD assigner; they have a lot of new TLDs not supported by 'real' DNS. (And, of course, lookups for regular TLDs work, too.) Not sure if you want to make it standard, but I'd be way impressed if an ISP gave me the choice of 'regular' DNS or OpenNIC DNS servers to use.
Oh! Don't forget to do your part and setup a good firewall. Another seemingly uncommon thing I've always thought ISPs should do was to do *good* egress filtering: filter traffic *leaving* your network too. I start to rant about this idea every time I read about a big DoS attack; if ISPs were more careful about what leaves their network, a lot of DoS attacks would simply get dropped at the attacker's ISP.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Just hire a guy to run around with a wheelbarrow full of CDs. The bandwidth is way higher.
Lots of reeplies are touting ethernet and wireless. Here's a few issues there--
First of all, ethernet wiring the entire building is expensive. There may already be an extra set of phone wires to each unit (my house happens to have seven pairs back to the nearest telco box, though it's a house) , and ADSL can share with phones. Distance wouldn't be an issue with the dsl hardware in the basement so speeds would be good and use existing wiring. DSL also gives a much better way to charge the users of the service. Disconnecting an ethernet jack could be made easy, sure, but DSL was made for this purpose and again, it uses existing wiring.
Wireless is messy with a lot of people and definitely subject to freeloading in a huge way. Remember the people have to *pay* for the T1 through their usage. 60 people might only work out to $10-20 a month which isn't bad at all, but still it needs to be enforced.
DSL could be the right choice here...
Brian
If you want to do DSL, it's cheaper and easier to do bridged DSL. Look up the Dexter device line. We use them. However we're moving away from DSL and migrating towards Cable. As an ISP, the telephone company, and cable TV company we found that it was cheaper by far to use the cable TV infrastructure to provide Internet access than it was for us to resell DSL. The AFC hardware is extremely expensive. You might also just consider putting in good ole Ethernet. It is very cheap and extremely easy to work with. You make each condo unit be its own VLAN and security issues are no more. You can use ACLs to classify and rate limit VLAN traffic at the border with ease. Every single Build-To-Order computer provider has Ethernet options, if they aren't already built in. The Ethernet standards are very well set in place. You no longer have vendor issues to deal with like you do every 5 seconds with wireless solutions. Even if you use the DSL or cable TV infrastructure to offer Internet access, the clients will still connect to the modem via Ethernet. It's cheaper, better, easier to work with, etc... Consider it. Fiber between buildings. Cat5e (6 if you can afford it) internally. Multiple jacks per residence. It's easy. Oh, and repair is extremely quick and easy to boot.
First off, I do this type of thing for a living, as a consultant to the CLEC and ISP trades, so I know a thing or two about the DSL market. Please, please, ignore the consensus of the Slashdot crowd who want you to pull Ethernet! They imagine that they'd want the better speed, but as a provider, you have to face reality. DSL has real advantages:
1) It lets you control the top speed. I suggest that the top speed to a user be less than half of your feed speed. A company I work very closely with has almost 200 DSL lines in a luxury condominium. They feed it with only two T1s. That's quite adequate! They have to pay for that bandwidth -- backbone ISP service isn't cheap, and the T1 loops into the condo aren't free either. Of course they only provide 700 kbps service. Sure, people might like more, but the competition is dial-up, and price matters.
2) DSL tolerates long wire. It can go a few miles, after all -- even a sprawling condo complex is a short hop for DSL. Ethernet tends to be pickier.
3) ADSL can share wire with telephone. You might be able to piggyback onto the phone wire. (A CLEC can; whether you can is a different issue.)
4) DSL is cheap! Lots of providers tanked, leaving good working gear on the secondary market. A 500-line Lucent Stinger can be had for $12k; a 200-line ADSL DSLAM is maybe half that. SDSL needs its own wire pair (can't share phone like ADSL) but the DSLAMs are a glut on the market, much cheaper than even that. Check eBay, telephone.com, etc.
I'd be happy to talk more about this offline (isdnip at netscape dot net)....
DSL requires expensive hardware. T1 is too slow. T3 is too expensive.
So? Go for fractional T3. Same thing as T3, minus a couple of your 28 T1 lines.
Most condos that I have seen are built with concrete or have many walls between rooms. This is necessary since condos need to be space efficient. Without an antenna, I can't reliably pick up a signal through a two layer brick wall or a concrete floor. Maybe access points can do better, but I doubt that they can go through more than two floors of concrete. Wood and drywall are much friendlier to wifi.
Sounds like a 60,000$ position. Benefits: working from home.
60,000/160 = 375$/year/apartment
versus $600/year for cable or dsl (at 50$/mo).
This doesn't include the cost of the initial setup or the outside connection, or rewiring, and upgrading the place in 10 years.
I'd probably avoid the mess. Its hard to compete with nationwide ISPs on price.
I looked at what jacks were available on my relative's suggestion, and settled on the six jack outlets (leviton? can't remember right now) for all the rooms except the kitchen. So in the bedrooms, the living room, and the dining room, we ran:
two cat 5e lines per jack for ethernet
two rg6 coax lines per jack for video/whatever
one cat 5e for two/two line phone jacks
for a total of 6 jacks, to opposite corners of each room.
The kitchen just got the phone/ethernet without the video (or maybe one video and one ethernet, two phone if I remember correctly) for a total of one 4 jack termination.
After going through tons of wire, we cut the dining room and kitchen from two/one to one/none on the coax, and several of the other rooms have one less ethernet line (for a total of one on each opposite corner, or one/two on each opposite corner).
After running all this wire, I was informed that having a patch panel wasn't enough, that a switch had to be centrally located. Bang! Since all the wiring terminates in the attic, and placing an electrical powered device in an attic that the tenants don't have access to is a no-no, this caused a problem. So extra wire was left for each run in the attic, and when tenants move in, they can have the option of which room to terminate all the wires in.
btw, having entered hundreds of other people's homes for my job, I've seen power strip, plugged into power strip, plugged into the wall outlet, due to a lack of outlets for today's electrical requirements. This was rectified immediately in the apartment renovations. The master bedroom alone has about 28 outlets, and other rooms are similarly equipped. A 24 breaker panel was installed in the apartments, with 18 breakers being used, and 6 pre-wired spares for future growth. This is in addition to the main panel in the basement that can handle another 4 breakers to spare.
Any suggestions on how to terminate the cat 5e wiring without installing a switch in the attic would be appreciated. The coax and cat 5e for telephone is already planned out.
How much wire? About 1900 feet of cat 5e, and about 1500 feet of coax per apartment.
DHCP was "invented" by the IETF. The whole "Microsoft invented DHCP" is a net.legend about as viable as Microsoft buying Redhat or Bill Gates sending you money to forward an email.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Man, did that question suck.
Doesnt he know how to set up a ethernet or wireless network and configure nat/proxies?
Ah, yes, you're right. I've been out of the networking field long enough that the finer details are starting to slip... (no pun intended)
Wow. That was subtle. I almost missed it.
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If you're going to pay to have wire run then run cat6. The additional cost of the cable over cat5 is negligable compared to the cost of actually running it. Pull at least 2 pairs (in case one gets damaged) and have them certified at cat5. You may want to consider pulling unterminated multimode fiber at the same time for the same reason. Keep your runs reasonably short and terminate them in switch closets every couple of floors. Connect the switch closets by fiber. Pick a central switch closet (ideally right beside the telco's demark) and drop fiber to there, this will be your demark.
For uplinks, the first thing you need to know is how close you are to your telco's CO. If you live in an urban center (which I assume you do), then you might have some nice options available to you. For example, my home uplink is a G.shdsl connection (2.3Mbps symmetric), but I live 900 line meters from the telco. You might be able to save yourself substantial amounts of money this way.
Finally, you need to pick an ISP since you do not want to be doing all the ISP stuff yourself.
What makes you think static IPs are a nightmare? Making your interfaces static is easy stuff for most OS, even M$. Some of your neighbors might like help unclicking the DHCP box their dial up or cable modem stuck them with, but most people can figure it out with reasonable instructions. It's not hard to run a DHCP server, but why deny your neighbors the blessings of permanent addresses to avoid a few set up issues? Call me an idiot, but I'd rather give my clients the best available.
People will surprise you if you give them the chance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I live in a condo. It was wired for the phone lines using CAT3. They were using 4 of the 8 wires (two twisted pairs) for two-phone line. Guess what? Ethernet only uses 4 wires; the other two twisted pairs in my CAT3 worked great. I put the cable modem in my utility closet and wired the ethernet from there. I just had to put the jacks everywhere there was a phone jack. Not elegant, but you would not have to do any wiring....
This is probably late and no one will read it.
I worked for a company that wired commercial and residential buildings in NYC. This is what I learned there:
RUNNING CABLE:
Contract the running of the cable to a good company.
If you are running new cable the cost of making the drops is way more than the cost of the cable itself. This means there is little difference between running CAT5,or CAT3 the adavantage of using DSL is that you can use existing phone wire and so avoid the cost of running new wire.
If you are running new wire go with Ethernet over CAT5 (5e,6 whatever the best you can get) Think about possibly running fiber. Again, the cost of the fiber itself isn't that much.
Fiber is a little less flexible and takes more skill to run and splice than CAT5 but over long distances you may not have a choice. Also media converters are costly. You could run the fiber alongside the CAT5 and not put any equipment on it at the ends. The cost will be less than deciding to run new fiber 5 years from now.
EQUIPMENT CLOSET
Try to keep your switches(other equipment) in one place, don't daisy chain them. You only will have to provide power, security and cooling to one location. Having switches (or DSLAMS) all over the place is not a good idea. You need to get access to the various places for maintenance etc. Costs go up too when you spread out: you might need UPS and Cooling for each location. If you don't then yo have to run to different places (and get access to different places) to fix them.
T1 LINES:
Depending on usage you may be able to get away with 1 T1. If I lived there I would like 2 or 4 or 8 sure, you can never have enough bandwidth but 1 might be enough. See how much they cost.
If you can afford it do get at least 2 though for redundancy. If you are unlucky enough to get a crappy set of lines from the phone company (this is probably more common on antique NYC Verizon lines) that T1 may be up and down for weeks or months and the phone company will take hours or days to fix it. Sure they will give you refunds off your bill or whatever the law says they have to do, but meanwhile 160 families are screaming for their Internet. If you have 2 T1's they'll notice things have gotten slower but they won't complain as much.
WIRELESS
Wireless is not as easy as people think it is. If you have clean lines of sight, are fairly isolated from other Wireless equipment or other sources of interference, and have buildings mostly made of wood, you might be OK. I wouldn't know. I was setting up wireless equipment in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and the Spectrum was lit up like a christmas tree. There's interference all over the place and the steel and concrete of the buildings blocked and bounced signals left and right. Someone with good testing equipment and lots of experience could do a better job than me. I was an amateur at wireles but I guess you are too.
Wireless is not magic. You just don't plug in an AP and everyone within 5 miles has 100Mb access. Maybe in the Suburbs conditions are better.
Wireless also has security problems unless you do it right. If I had a choice I'd do Ethernet over CAT5 or better.
That's it. Document everything and post your experiences. Good luck
Here are my 2 cents worth. I've been in and around this stuff for 26 years (and yes, I do have, what used to be prematurely, grey hair):
1. Put in CAT5, or even CAT6 if you can afford it. Put in twice as much as you think is reasonable. Get it certified and tested. Next time you think you need just those couple of extra pair, you won't regret it. The big hit in any infrastructure installation is labor - you are going to spend about as much for labor to have two CAT6 cables pulled in to a jack as you would pay to have one CAT5.
2. NAT would be a pain in the ass for your users if they want to do anything more complex than web browsing and mail. This sounds like a multi-year project - what do you think people are going to be doing with the Internet in two years? Doing SIP telephony, H.323 multimedia, etc. etc. through a NAT connection borders on impossible for an average user.
3. No matter what you think the skill level is of your users, cut it in half. People seem to get dumber than dirt when they get home at night. I have personal experience - I'm living in a residential compound in Kazakhstan right now. I spend my days working for the Man, nights dealing with residents who stuck floppy disks to their fridges with magnets.
4. All the cool stuff like web cache, proxy servers, even community web sites are very nice. With every single item, just think about who is going to support those things after you make your fortune and move to a grass hut in Tonga? KISS in all things.
5. On the subject of support - residents are 24/7/365. When the Smith family can't have that video conference with Grandma on Christmas morning, who they gonna call? Set up a well understood service level agreement that every resident signs. Make it simple, but clear. The rule of thumb is that if it can be explained in an elevator between floors, it's about right.
6. Fiber isn't that expensive, and there are some cool devices available now for doing lots of fun things with it. Investigate using it for house distribution. In 5 years when those 2mb DSL connections become passe', and folks start wanting those 10-20mb connections, they will look at your portrait on their mantle and smile.
7. Here's a turnaround for you: Have you thought about cable modems? Not only can you do a few channels for high speed data, you can also do digital TV distribution, and telephone distribution. What if the folks had a TV channel for the community front gate, so they could see when the mother-in-law is coming?
Have fun - this if obviously a passion for you. On those all-nighters when you are trying to solve some stupid routing problem, remember it was YOUR idea.
Andy
"You can't have everything. Where would you keep it?" -- Steven Wright
I was an ISP for over 8 years till I sold out to the local Telco. My suggestion would be to pull Cat5e to each condo from a central location.
Next you have to determine whether you want to allow each user to see the other person's traffic or not. If you want to create one large network and allow local gaming for instance...you may want this capability. If you are concerned about privacy from others within your building, you may want to prevent it. You may want to be able to configure it either way. The least expensive way to accomplish this is probably little hardware routers - you could put static routes in for each condo and still allow the local networking for those that want it. If you just use standard hubs/switches, then anyone could sniff anyone else's line - which like I said may or may not be a problem.
I would suggest not bothering with a T1 line - In my experience you won't really get a full T1 in most cases. I would call up your local cable provider and ask them for a special rate for one high speed connection - Shaw in Canada here sells one for less than $500 CDN a month and gives you more than a T1 in bandwidth - over 400K/s( T1 is about 1.5 megabits or 180K/s).
Anyway...my nickel's worth.
jim.nickel@softhome.net
Have you thought about providing television and internet over coaxial cable? Cisco makes some nice cable gear here. As far as content, you can set up some c-band satellite dishes and distribute content via the same wire and get multiple revenues over one network....and it's capable of faster speeds than non-shielded/twisted copper.
-ted
Binarywave makes a very small DSLAM which uses an ethernet backhaul. Very inexpensive. Check it out! BinaryWave
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Check out Ciscos Long Range Ethernet (LRE) products also look into tutsystems, these two solutions will help get you started. if you are planning to do this make sure the phone company terminates in a phone room and you will be responsible for all phone lines to the condo's shoot me an e-mail and I will be glad to help in any wau I can, I designed a system for a 3500 space RV park (funding did not work out) but then again the ISP business is pure hell. any one out there who would like my take on these systems may e-mail me at nukedesign@hotmail.com if i get /. ed my mailbox may overflow.
Wireless is the way to go. No running cables. You can be anywhere in the complex and use your laptop, PDA, or whatever. A reasonable amount of security (probably restricting by mac address) should be fairly easy.
You don't have to do all that to connect your computer to the internet with a fixed IP. Many users did just that to their Windoze boxes in the much better early days of cable modems and competitive DSL service. They learned to their cost about Windoze. The same can be said for dial up and windoze, it's just a little harder to notice poor performance that way, until the poor thing dies which joe six-packs think is normal.
He's talking about providing "communal" Internet access for his condominium. With affordable, professionally administered, tech-supported alternatives, such as telco DSL and cable, do you honestly think people are going to spend days ... learning a whole new style of computing, just so they can fit into his geek experiment?
Nice flame, ass. I honestly think better appartments or condos would have fixed IP internet service through available as part of the rent. Keep your comerical software, you deserve it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Just do this - a 24 or 32port ethernet switch, then you run cat5 out to "groups" of say 7 units which have a el-cheapo 8 port switch which provides 1 port for each of thoes 7 units. This way hardware costs are much lower, much less cable is used and performance is still fine.
Then as someone else sugguested a linux/bsd box with squid & traffic shaping. PLus an archive, smtp & mail server. Then connect the box to a T1 or 2x DSL lines - whatever has good bandwith and is fairly cheap. The end result should be an internet thats much better than dialup and probably cheaper. If anyone in the condo's dosent like it then they can pay for their own direct DSL line or whatever.
Layer-3 switching, Anonymous Jackass, is a switch that is also capable of making forwarding decisions based on Layer-3 (Network) information.
Examples of Layer-3 switches are numerous, but since I'm a Cisco guy, allow me to direct you to:
- Cisco Catalyst 3550 Series (w/either the SMI or EMI Images)
- Cisco Catalyst 4000 Series (w/the Supervisor 3 or Supervisor 4)
- Cisco Catalyst 5000 Series (w/the Route Switch Module)
- Cisco Catalyst 6000 Series (w/the Multi-layer Switching Module, or MSFC I or II (Multi-layer Switching Feature Card))
There are plenty of others in Cisco's lineup, and from a wide range of other manufactures.The key is that any of these platforms can perform inter-Vlan routing without the need of an external router. The routing feature has been integrated into the switch. (And is typically performed in hardware, through the use of ASICs)
Get yourself a SlashdotID... They're free.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Get a fat pipe broadband in and route it into a Linux box, then set a rack of switches for as many connects as you need.
Be your own ISP, sort of. You can admin the router and shape traffic, etc... With a good Linux package you can keep the peeps safe from hackers and if you see someone abusing the system from inside you can throttle them down, block ports, what ever. You make the rules.
DSL is just trash. Besides, this way the users only have to have cheap ethernet cards, can choose the OS they please, no special hardware or software required. It will work for everyone and all platforms.
Easy and cheap to install, maintain, setup, expand... Just like in an office...
> making forwarding decisions based on Layer-3
Wow, he embarrasses himself again. If it's layer 3, then it's routing. You really need to do some reading before posting publicly on something dealing with networking.
> these platforms can perform inter-Vlan routing
Then why not tell the truth and call it what it is? It's a very fast router with very few features.
This link shows the website of a community that put together a coop so they could provide DSL service to the people living in their subdivision. I think the tricky part are the government regulations involved.
I've been advising my landlord and apt manager on doing just this in our 32-unit complex. Here's the low-down: ;-)
- Bonded cable (2 x CAT-5e, 2 x fiber, 2 x coax) from each unit to one of two muxing locations in the attic. One coax for satellite dishes, one CAT-5 for ethernet, the rest for phone line replacement and future expandability.
- The CAT-5 runs to two patch panels, each sitting next to a 24-port VLAN-capable switch. Patch cords are used for manual activation/deactivation/static IP address assignment (only 16 static IPs are available from the ISP.)
- The switches connect to one diskless linux router that boots from a CD. VLAN's are used to keep users from broadcasting to and impersonating one another. The router box has 6 NICs: two to the switches and four out to four 1.5m/768k DSL lines, which are TCP load-balanced.
- Users who are assigned a static IP have two overlayed subnets on their VLAN segment: one with the static IP, whose bandwidth maxes out at the speed of the DSL line on which that IP resides, and one with dynamic IP, which is NAT'ted over all the DSL lines at once. Therefore, there can be three 1.5m downloads at once before anyone is likely to notice any degradation, and web pages in particular load really quickly since every image can go on a different line (TCP connection reuse is not always performance-improving
I actually work for a company that does this type of thing. What we have on our properties is a mix of proprietary equipment and DSLAMs splitting one or more T1 lines. First, the proprietary:
TUT Systems (http://www.tutsys.com/) builds an expandable rackmount unit that transmits over any twisted pair line. While it can be run on top of dial tone (DT), it can cause problems to both services, so it's better to run it on a dry pair. This also eliminates the need for the resident to purchase a landline, since cell prices can be cheaper in some areas. It uses a very simple modem that requires no software and has no settings - you just plug it in and it works. The whole system can handle something along the lines of 136 subscribers.
The other systems we have run on typical DSLAMs spliting the T1(s). This method works better than TUT over DT, but we still run on a dry pair whenever possible. It uses just about any type of DSL modem, but you can run into configuration issues there. The ones we have been using must be configured in a Windows environment before they can be used on a Linux or Mac box, but they also have a 4-port hub built into them vs. the TUT's single RJ45 output.
The main disadvantage of the DSLAM system is the DSLAMs themselves can get spendy, depending on how many units you need to feed. You may be able to offset this initial cost buy grabbing used gear from ebay.
In both setups, the path is: T1(s)-->router-->DSLAM or TUT-->phone pair-->modem. There is no need for multiple switch arrangements, and we have easily pushed signal a quarter mile through multiple connect points and across 40-yr-old copper with no hiccups.
Happy networking!
The Cyberwolfe
Ahh, I see you've decided to go psycho. Godspeed.
Since each user is in his own apartment, he isn't going to want his neighbors across the hall browsing his hard drive. Security is going to be a problem, methinks, and needs to be addressed and signed off on by each subscribed user. That's what I would do if it were my project. Hence, bandwidth between the nodes isn't an issue, unless a group of tenants get together and start throwing LAN parties (quake? I don't game, but you get the idea).
Broadcasts and other garbage on the wire might be an issue, but I still maintain that the outbound pipe is the whole point to this excercise. The switches will cut down on the broadcasts, running firewalls on each host will cut down on some of the other junk (I'd make this a part of the installation fee). If the LAN gets a worm, that'll kill your bandwidth, but in that case the admin will have more problems to worry about than the slow network.
Hmm... I'm starting to like this idea :-) I wonder if I could sell apartment networking here in New Orleans?
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
First of all, Wireless is VERY insecure, even when properly configured, and I am guessing the comunity doesn't want to hire a full time wireless security employee. So, I would suggest the LRE solution from Cisco. I am usually not very proprietary when it comes to solutions, but Cisco has the market share and the rep with this kind of aplications. For those who are scratching there heads, LRE or Long Reach Ethernet is 10baseT over borrowed cat3 pairs. Setting this up would tie all of the MAIN phone lines to each appartment to a box at central locations and those boxes are then connected using a standard Network Backbone. The user side would have an LRE translater (similar to a DSL line filter) that provides the with an RJ45 jack. I would suggest using a simple Linux DHCP server on the network. For the new instalations, Use Cat5e. The Cat5e will suport Gig over coper. This could be a possible selling point to potential buyers, especially if there are any tech related companies in the area. In the new units, run ALL phone, signal, and network wires as Cat5e, seperate runs for each terminating at a simple patch pannel. This will provide the greatest flexability for everyone and reduce the headaches that can be caused by messy splicing and aid in trouble shooting as well as provide greater flexability to the user. This is a HUGE project. I would suggest getting ahold of an integrater in the area or a good national one. I know of one company that would be perfect to help you. Let me know if you need help! bjjohnson@wi.rr.com Also, if anyone else is interested in dicussing this topic outside of /., send me an email.
Cheers and happy connecting!
BJ
Hmmm... Technology... anyone have a match?
Layer 3 switching is the application of Routing ideals and practices at the switch level. It is not a router. And as if that wasn't enough, guess what they are already out with... LAYER 4 SWITCHES. they allow blocking services at the port level... ie. DHCP, DNS (servers), ping... Here is a link for you to chew on...
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/so/neso/lnso/c pso/l3c85_wp.htm
That should demistify it for you.
Any ?'s let me know.
Brad
p.s. I am bad at html and spelling. If you don't like it... too bad. ;-)
Hmmm... Technology... anyone have a match?
Some guy gets an 'idea' that he can do something without ever doing it before and puts out an article like this on slashdot...about once a week now it seems.
I begin to wonder if some of these arent simply college psych class assignments to see exactly what the state of the industry is. Im all for information sharing, but the level of insight most of these project will require will NEVER appear on any of these slashdot boards.
I can see the next one already; Im thinking about sending an orbiter to Neptune, and I was wondering if anyone has ever had any success doing this. Can you give me some ideas of problems I might face? Which solution worked best for you?
Im not criticizing the spirit to attain a new goal, just the expectation that any real use can be had by posing such questions in this type of format.
I dont need to know it all, I just need to know more than you.
And what's wrong with ISDN? With ISDN you can keep bundling lines as and when they are needed - and you can single handedly resurrect the failing economy!
I am surprised no one has mentioned the this before - CogentCo. If you don't already have an upstream provider or bandwidth don't bother with multiple T1s or other more expensive means. This is the main business that Cogent is in - providing large connections to offices and multiple dwelling properties. The run the line to your central office and provide the hardware to translate it. When it's all said and done they hand you a cat 5 cable and you can plug it into any kind of equipment you want.
Last I checked they offer a 1000 MBs (about 66 T1's!) for $1000US a month. Some people say their piering isn't great but for the money and serving residential consumers I think it is more than adequate.
Wireless is foolish, fiber is perhaps overkill. Throttled 10/100 cat 5/6 should be more then enough for the next few years and you can always allow them to have full speed transfers between units and just throttle the up/down stream to the internet. Best of luck. Don't try to make this more complex than it has to be.
Sam Cooke
[note: I do NOT work for Cogent or any affliated companies, but I have used them for a few installations similar to what the author is doing.]
What are the best current options (wireless?)
for sharing a network connection (T1, etc.)
in a small area/neighborhood ?
---eludom
18:41 2/5/2546
...
c ablemodem.com/ (?)
Topic:Condo.network
Hi!
i saw on a trade show internet over TV-cable. (is this cat5?)
the tv-signal and the network-data can co-exist.
no hassle with re-cableing the building, even though it is great fun : )
max. (i'm guessing from memory) 2Mbit/s.
jack the "cable-modem" into the Tv-signal outlet.
ground-floor: one "cable modem", i suppose
they sell "cable-modem-say-router" which then connects to the internet.
security in the condo might be a issue. Hacking the local intranet
and see what P0rn your hairy-neigbhour's got installed
there are some sec. solutions (say software) for cable-modems.
but then again that shouldn't be your problem. you're just providing the
infrastructure, yes? unless your neigbhour might be *cute*.
bring a pizza *yawn*.
***
Google.search:"cable-modem"
->http://www.
Defines interfaces for cable modems involved in high speed data distribution over cable television networks
***
good luck!
LAYER 4 SWITCHES
Your lack of clue is showing. I followed this thread with some interest, because I'm one of the many that is sick and tired of clueless idiots using the word switch to describe a router. If the router is looking at the port # in the packet, it is working with the transport layer. That is two layers above the data link layer. It is not switching, just as the process of looking at the network layer(IP addrs) isn't switching either. If it's above the data-link layer, it is not switching.
Why don't you pick-up a text book and read-up on the 7-layer ISO network model. It doesn't completely apply to TCP/IP, or any other widely used network protocol, but it will teach you the basics.
Not the point. As the other fellow says, traffic shaping.
The point behind a T1 is that you get 1.544 megabytes of bandwidth. Period. Not 'peak of 1.544,' not '1.544 theoretical,' 1.544. Done.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I have been trying to find out how to replace this with some cisco type gear to enable both broadband and about 30 TV channels fed from a satellite over the same cable network without rewiring with 10BaseT. I can't find any company that knows how to do this but there must be a few who can since what I want is quite similar to what (some) hotels provide.
And you've just shown your lack of knowledge. There are Layer 4 Switches, and they're called just that. They're load balancers or anything that makes a switching decision based on port. You should probably call ALL NETWORK COMPANIES and tell them that they're advertising their products wrong. Damn Cisco, this isn't a Layer 3 Switch, some bonehead told me it's a router. Ever hear of a 6509???? Layer-3 Switch, and guess what you can now apply a load balancing card... Guess what!!!! LAYER 4 DECISIONS!!! I love people who flame people and don't know themselves what they're talking about.
Fiber changes. Single mode fiber from 5 years ago won't handle the newer services today. It'll handle some of them, but not all. If you really want to gamble, be my guest. It could be a really expensive proposition. Gig-E is plenty cheap over copper. If you have the budget, and want to install new cable to each apartment, consider putting in conduit. That way, you can put in a run of Cat 5 today (or 5E, or 6,) and fiber in the future. Ethernet access has drawbacks. You need a router, and you need to secure it. If you partner w/ a local ISP, fine. They can share responsibility. I've dealt with users. It's not pretty. Trust me. You want someone else answering those phone calls at 2am. As far as DSL is concerned, you can buy a fully carded Cisco 6100 chassis $500 and set it up over whatever in-house wiring is in the building. A basic 6100 with 2-port CAP cards will serve up to 64 apartments with ADSL at line rates up to 7meg. I'd approach a local ISP about administering the user base, and providing internet access. Then, call the local telco and price out T1 and T3 access, decide what you want for bandwidth and cost, and place your order. Bolt in a 7' Hendry or Newton rack, bolt in the DSLAM, some patch panels, a $500 POTS splitter, wait for the T1/T3 to get installed, and tell the users to go down to Best Buy or Ebay and buy modems. If they need help with their mail passwords, they can call the ISP. The ISP will provide IPs. The users provide their own security. I would negotiate price with the ISP-- you're providing them with 30 customers, no advertising. Drop me a message, I can answer more questions. There big decision is whether to go with T1 or T3. T1 won't be enough bandwidth, T3 would be great, but really expensive. You might find an ISP willing to try wireless T3. I've seen some line-of-sight DS3's that would allow you to forget the local Telco. Some of them are line-of-sight, some are not. Range is as high as 15 miles. Again, send me a message and I'll provide you with more info.
-- No sig for you!
I work for a *cough* anonymous broadband provider who wires apt. complexes in a similar manner to what has been described here. I.E. Dslam to fourth pair on the phone lines.
That will be unfortunately the most cost effective in initial installation. Its advanatages being greater distance without a repeater. No need for patch panel to fiber eq. And acess from every phone jack.
Disadvantages being higher maintenance. A need for dsl transfer adapters (modems). Greater chance of lightning damage.
So high cost up front or high cost later those are your options. Expect to have to have techs to trouble shoot if you go with the dsl option.
Also to be cost effective dhcp via mac address and nat to have only one ip addy will be your only options.
Which means dun dun dun more tech support for people swapping mac addies.
Oh and wireless? hmm most places dont like looks of correct line of sight placement. They want to hide the dishes. Then you have the security issues oi vey. I dont care what anyone says wireless is not and never will be as secure. Wep is a joke. Sure properly implemented on a smaller scale its possible to have a modicum of security but.. Apt complex wide it is a nightmare.
I didn't think about bugs. That could be a pain. If he does go the ethernet route he's going to have to have someone manage the network and help people set up their equipment. Maybe he'll need to get a site license for firewalls and antivirus to ensure that his renters have the minimum proper protection.
Another problem he will run into is bandwidth hogs. A guy here in town set up a wireless internet service, and has to put the smack down almost weekly on someone trying to act as a Kaza node. It's pretty funny he cuts their bandwidth down to 5k each direction. Normally everyone has full access to the T1. It's usually someone who doesn't know any better, but after a week or so they call to find out why their connection became so slow.
Regards,
Brad
Hmmm... Technology... anyone have a match?
Plenum is good but the rest of the post scares me man. :D Wiring a building is an investment and there is absolutely no reason to half-ass the job. The standard is to use 2 pairs and have 2 unused, not run another signal, or god forbid, even power over. If you do that your cable probably isn't going to qualify over 10Mbs if you put it on a certifier. As far as splicing....just dont. Even with an actual connector meant for this it still kills the signal so quick, I can't even imagine what some hand done rigged splice would do. It doesn't sound like he needs a high performance lan, but just be aware such techniques are bad if you do....
I've never used this product before but alot of WISP running friends have. http://www.ethersplit.com/ They shoot service to the house via wireless then use it to share it out. Maybe it would help you out. A business class dsl account might be more suited or at least make a nice addition.
Seriously consider more backbone, thats sure not much for that many people.
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it." -Voltaire
I'd rather go back to 14,4K modem, thanks. And what happens when your 160 users start sharing their connections between rooms? And for the cost this will add to your residents' maintenance fees they'll be better off writing out each packet's contents on paper and hopping on an airplane with it.
You haven't even provided a name, much less any kind of credential, testifying to your level of expertise.
You have a cursory understanding of the OSI model, which is great in preparing for th Net+ exam, I suppose, but really doesn't qualify you to sift through postings on Slashdot, and determine who does, and does not, know what they are talking about.
I've been working exclusively in the network space for the past 13 years, primarily with Cisco routers and switches for the past 9. I've built networks for Fortune 10 companies, and Government agencies.
Ever build a campus network for a 70 building, 10,000 user Marine Base? I have.
Ever build a network for a 30 Campus University? I have.
Ever configured a 1500+ site frame relay network? I have.
Tell me something about BGP community settings, or Multi-Exit Descriminators? Tell me something about IS-IS, the only interior routing protocol that is capable of handling the entire BGP table when redistributed into it. Tell me about Type-7 LSAs, or the trouble with OSPF in NMBA environments. Tell me about tuning Spanning-tree in my campus. Tell me about NBAR, CBAC, and Reflexive access-lists.
Last but not least... Please, Sir, tell me more about how there's no such thing as a Layer-3 switch... I so much want to learn.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
HTH,
Enby in Waltham