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Wiring a Neighborhood?
mklencke writes "I'm part of a project that is developing a small neighborhood of about 30 houses in the Netherlands with technology, durability and ecological features in mind. We are looking at centralizing the Internet, TV, phone and radio access. Options we have come across are a central satellite dish, a central subscriber line, etc. Preferably, fiber optics will be used. However, it is very difficult to have a good overview of possibilities, and fiber optics technology is apparently very expensive to implement. Have any Slashdot readers been engaged in a similar project? Do you have hints or resources on how to go about wiring our neighborhood?"
To avoid bottlenecks and critical points of failure, I think a decentralized and redundant architecture would be more favorable. But it's only 30 homes, not a high rise office building.
As someone who wired my house when I built it, I have one MAJOR thing I would do differently. Every room should have at least two cat5 ports on the wall that run to a central box in the basement. Then all these cat5 ports can be patched together any way you please, rather than forcing them to use certain paths. This makes it so much easier to design your home network in a way that suits you rather than the way that works with what you've wired.
Puns aside, The Netherlands is quite a high-tech nation. When I was working there about 15 years ago, they even had very favorable income tax rules for foreign high-tech workers (I don't know if they still do). In addition, the Dutch are well-educated, super-friendly and fun, have great beer, french fries, cheese and museums (the drugs and sex stuff is mostly for tourists). In all, Holland is a great country that would be the envy of all Americans if they ever took their heads out of the sand. Just don't make a wrong turn while driving or you might end up in another country. ;-)
- A Canadian
if you're implimenting this stuff, you need to either know it like the palm of your own hand, because you will be the one that will be called when there are problems.
from the tone of your 'ask slashdot' this isn't the case.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hoi, I am dutch... Get 2 ADSL accounts at xs4all or similar and use 2 linux based routers to balance traffic between the 2 lines, it will feel very fast for all that way. Use 3 if you still experience some slowness... This way it is 10 houses that share the account cost of 1 line but get's room for 3 lines... Optical lines are only at the outskirts of our main cities so that is not a viable (financial) solution coming years... I hope this helps...
If you decide that you want to throw cable or fiber or whatever else in the ground you might end up with a pretty hip subdivision, but only for a few years.
Rather than deciding on what technology is the best for your cost situation at this time, instead realize that the costs of these technologies is rapidly changing all the time as new technologies come out.
Instead of giving advice on what technology to use now, I'd advise that you make sure you put flexible use conduits all over the neighborhood so that when you inevitably decide that whatever you're using is no longer fast enough, you can change it all. It would be pretty difficult to get everyone to agree on change if it meant digging up the whole block.
BigFiber.net
Cable is free; installing it is expensive. Doubly so when you start talking about putting it in the earth.
Therefore if you end up putting wires in the ground try to future-proof it. Run at least 2 4-pair runs (cat5e or cat6). You can use one of them right away for very quick networking and the other one for phone
Then, add 4 or so strands of cheap multi-mode fiber. You don't need it today, so don't bother terminating the ends. They may come in handy down the road for cable tv/internet use.
finally a run of standard cable tv coax for cable tv needs today
If you can scrape up the capital, I'd strongly recommend looking into expanding your plan significantly. Buying fiber transcievers for 30 connections is expensive, but getting enough for 10,000 would be a fraction as much per unit. The economies of scale involved are staggering. Even if you have to at least temporarily set up a separate CO for each small group of connections you'd be way ahead.
I've been involved in two projects over the last 10+ years where we stubbed in fiber for new construction projects. It was never used in either case.
I'd suggest running two or three sets of Cat 6 cable to each building. That should be more than enough for the forseeable future, and only a small price premium over Cat 5. After all, most of the cost will be labor.
But run the cable in a buried, oversized PVC raceway. Then, if you need to run fibre, or anything else in the future it will be easy to do.
It's different matter if the residential area includes some public space or it's just completely private. If it's private, probably you should build an infrastructure of conduits and pipes, and a central location for telco operators to connect. Your infrastructure should provide some space for private owned cables (LAN, etc) and some different pipe for telco company cabling. You could probably make an agreement with them to pay part of the cost. If public, you probably can't or shouldn't build anything, just use wireless for local networking.
I gather mobilemesh is not an ideal solution, but it is good enough for neighbourhood sized networks, until the state of the art advances, producing a better successor.
I would recommend against wireless: while it may seem attractive, you will not be able to deliver the quality of TV service that people expect over most wireless systems. Wireless is still pretty expensive (for commercial-grade kit) and it's not very mature.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Assuming you lay fiber/Cat6 underground, what provisions will be made for future digs?
Here in the states, before you dig anything, generally you can call a central number, and they will contact *all* the utilities to mark any underground lines.
Water, cable, power, phone. Basically, anything buried on your property.
One way or another, you'd have to be hooked into whatever similar system exists in NL. Some guy, 10 years from now, 2 owners from now, will want to install a pond, or other such excavation, and cut right through your cable.
If you leave a string in each run, changes are much easier. Do not use cotton, use something which won't rot.