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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?"
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
I'd agree with this comment. With DSL, you'd basically need to set up a telephone switching office on sight. As an alternative, you can set up an all ethernet system where everything is connected via router to the T1 line, or you can set up several wireless access points and hook them up to the same router, and save a lot of trouble running a CAT5 cable to every unit.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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.
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.
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
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'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
You would be surprised. I lived in a 50 person condo that bought a 3Mbit DSL and ran Cat 5 to each apartment. There was NO tech support, just a one page pamplet telling you how to setup DHCP.
cost per unit = $100 / 50 = $2 per UNIT.
Downside: if it went down there was nobody to call, it would take the person in charge a day to figure out that it was down and get around to fixing it.
Upside. Did I mention it was $2 a month? Well actually it was free. The condo board was able to do it without raising the HOA fees. So my out of pocket expense was $0 a month.
If someone absolutely had to have an Internet connection I suppose they could have bought a cable modem. Then they would always have two options to connect to the Internet.
What I don't understand is why you want to become a DSL "provider". Are you really planning on charging each tenant a monthly fee if they want this? You will be adding so many more expenses! Just buy the DSL and share it, don't make a business out of it!
So my steps are:
1) Buy DSL
2) Share It with CAT 5, Wireless, whatever you want
3) Pay a resident who will be using it a lot $100 a month to keep it up. (Not to support idiots, just to make sure the network stays up). If residents need help they can independently pay him money or another neighbor that is smart enough to set it up.
4) Pay for it with HOA fees, don't add extra billing and other overhead. Just treat the DSL as your HOA probably treats Water, and Cable TV. (You DO have a bulk rate with the cable company, right?)
5) Do not try and start a DSL provider company on the side of the HOA. The HOA's purpose is to serve the residents, not to start making money off of them.
The answer to this problem is Layer-3 switching, and VLANs.
Put every apartment unit on it's own VLAN, and at the Core, use access-lists to prevent each VLAN from accessing it's neighbors.
The hardware costs are nominal, as you only need one Layer-3 enabled device at the core, and the access layer switches can be fairly modest. In Cisco-speak, each VLAN interface would look like this, and the attached access-list would prevent Inter-neighbor traffic:
Since I'm a Cisco bigot by trade, I'd recommend a Cataylst 3550 (w/the SMI image) as the core device, and Cat 2900XLs at the access layer. Use fiber between the closets as others have suggested.
I'd also recommend giving each unit it's own static NAT/PAT translation outbound to the Internet, so that if something illegal should occur, you can determine that unit that originated the trouble. No sense getting everyone in trouble (Certainly not you!) for a single troublemaker.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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.
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suwain_2
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)....
Let me explain some bandwidth math to you, since you haven't managed to pick any up at your day job.
Obtaining a T-1 Internet connection to a Tier-1 ISP (Not some low rent ISP 6 AS hops away from MAE-East) costs in the neighborhood $1200 - $1500 per month.
Now, obtaining a Point-to-point T-1, intra-lata, costs around $295 per month; maybe a little more or less depending on the carrier.
If I purchase 100Mbps service at a co-lo, with no traffic metering, and a rack space, I pay a lot, but I can support 70 T-1 connections without any over subscription(!).
So do some math...
In my other posts, I specifically addressed using multiple T-1s, which again, is a lot more expensive when the other end of the circuit terminates at a Tier-1 ISP than when it terminates at your own equipment. So the equation is not "$100/month for 1/160th of 1.5Mbps." It's "$850/month for Rent" vs. "$950/month for Rent, and Free High-speed Internet."
You, as the renter, have no idea what I'm charging you for the Internet access. It's a hidden cost...
Who said anything about getting address space from ARIN? I'm talking about getting it from an upstream provider... And it's dirt fucking cheap, when you're turning around and collecting $1200/year for each address.
Lastly...
I'll try to remember that as I wander up and down the butt-empty co-location facilities here in the Northern Virginia/Dulles Corridor area...
My co-lo rack can service a lot more than 1 T-1 connection... It's called economies of scale. You should read a book some time.
You almost have a point... Yes, 1 rack at a co-lo, plus 1 T-1, to 1 remote locations would be far more expensive than a single T-1 connection to an ISP... And it may indeed always be that way...
But 1 rack at a co-lo, plus 15 T-1s, split across 5 remote locations is a far cry cheaper than 15 T-1s to ISPs.
And with the markup at the customer end, you can see why this would make money.
Of course, with all of your "I work at an ISP" experience, you might not be aware that making money is the point of the business in the first place.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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