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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?"
This isn't a direct answer to the question since I don't know how to best wire a neighbourhood, however if it has to be an ecological solution then less wires are good, so wireless internet access might be the way to go (depending upon how much weight ecological gets in comparison to the others). Of course you will want to wrap some good security around that.
Otherwise if you need wires then double up on the power lines for internet access instead of laying new wires.
Just a couple of quick thoughts off the top of my head.
Get tons of cat5 connections in the walls. Even if you dont get a port there, wire every foot of the wall with Cat5. Cat5 is so cheap these days, why not?
Not sure about it but try applying to some Voice-over-IP pliot project thing. When you pick up your phone it routes that call through your network, to some pbx, then out to the real world. You would have to plug in each phone, but these days, most need to be in an outlet anyway.
Also try WiFiMAX. It is this new standard that is fast and covers a large area.
my $000.00003 cents
I don't have experience in such project, but what comes to my mind is: Try not to lock out options. Buildings last long times, it-infrastructrures change. Scalability, upgradability, options. Don't choose one technology. Choose flexibility to change media later.
Your project sounds very interesting!
Well, seems like there's 30 people who decided to build their hoses together. They probably know each other. They will get a much better deal by doing it themselves. If I was doing this, I'd not want the phone company in on the deal.
I think this would be an obvious step, run the cables to a central 'hub/switch'. You'd have to be on some pretty hard stuff to hard wire an entire neighbourhood! This is probably a good idea for the rest of the services too! Another point, any legal issues with sharing any of these connections?! Not something you want to find out six months later.
It's not off the shelf, but what about setting up a local area mesh using Ronja as the interconnect and some free/open source meshing software?
A better idea would be to run all your internet connections over the local power lines. That way, you not only save a tremendous amount of money on materials, but you'll also probably be required to get it installed by professionals anyway, so it'll almost certainly get done right the first time. After that, you really only have to get your central connection working. Satellite seems like a poor choice because of the enormous latency involved. With the number of houses you're planning to hook up, I'd recommend a fractional T3 (maybe 10mbit max) unless you're a neighborhood full of bandwidth-sucking geeks, in which case, the sky's the limit ;-)
Good luck on your project, and here's to modern communcations infrastructure!
There are a myriad of free software tools available for download that you can run on even a lowly 486 machine in your basement and have enough horsepower to route an entire subdivision like you are talking about.
The low cost of Linux hardware along with the generous pricing of Linux OS itself makes this type of system especially attractive. It also leaves room in the budget for things that can really make a difference in the network like extra 802.11 ports.
Go with Linux, you won't be disappointed.
If you want the town to have their very own dedicated TV/phone/data services, that means that you're going to have to provide them.
In other words, you're going to have to start some kind of local utility company to handle all that. It won't be cheap, or easy. And, it won't be profitable, with only 30 subscribers.
In other words, don't build ANYTHING. Let everyone buy their services from the big, mean national companies that can afford it.
Go with fiber. Running fiber is cheap. The expensive part is the network equipment to go with it. But fiber is the future. You can run anything over it. And technology is used to enhance existing fiber runs, therefore your investment in fiber will last a long time.
Use VoIP across the fiber for telco.
Not sure about TV, but I'm sure someone out there has something to multiplex video and data.
Run everything to a central closet in each house and use it to do runs to every location in the house. Run CAT6+ everywhere using it for telco and PC. At least dual jack plates. Consider multiple plates in each room, especially living room. Use very high grade cabling in the home to avoid having to replace it.
You can use Asterisk for VoIP. Use something like a Catalyst 4000 for the fiber. Put each house on it's own VLAN and the telco to each house on another.
noone has mentioned wireless yet. Requires no house-house wiring, RF technology can be changed/upgraded in the future without having to upgrade house-house wiring like you would if say in 5 years cat10 is required for the most speed. Just swap your radio when the next 1Gbit wireless technology is here. There are several well documented neighborhood wireless projects out there.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
Check out locustworld software it's open source however there are quite a few resellers that sell boxes with the locustworld meshap software loaded. Very nicely done mesh wireless software which is already being used quite widely in the UK and somewhat over here as well.
If the community is less than 500m across, and each house is relatively close to the next, just set up GBE from house to house with a 4 way GBE switch in each house. This can be done for very cheap, like $120 per house.
This is an example of a Swedish town that has done it a couple of years ago:
http://www.bjornerback.com/tomas/mattgrand
[Dutch story]
In het noord-Zweedse plaatsje Umeå hebben een paar bewoners van de gemeenschap Måttgränd zelf het initiatief genomen tot de aanleg van een hoogwaardige 100Mb aansluiting. Eerst hebben de initiatiefnemers een deal gesloten met een kabelbedrijf en met een ISP en hebben hen ervan overtuigd een prijs te berekenen gebaseerd op 95-100 % aansluiters. De initiatiefnemers zijn vervolgens van deur tot deur gegaan en hebben de wijkbewoners ervan overtuigd dat ze mee moeten doen. Inderdaad hebben 60 van de 62 huizen ja gezegd, meer dan 95% van de inwoners dus, "because they saw it was 'The Future' standing on their doorstep". In 1999 is men begonnen met de aanleg. Sommige stukken hebben de bewoners eigenhandig gegraven.
First of all, for your telcom needs I would just put everything over power lines. I don't know about communications regulations in your neck of the woods, but there's nothing technologically stopping you from putting TV, VoIP telephone, broadband internet, and electricity over one power line at different frequencies. I mean, if you lose power you lose it all, but quite frankly if you lose power you probably don't need your TV or internet: use battery powered radio instead. That might not be feasible for a smaller project, but if you have the option it's the least intrusive.
As far as housing goes, please, oh please, concentrate on passive technologies for energy efficiency and just forget about BS like photovoltaic cells. If you want "free" energy setup a windmill farm, the technology is 100x better and cheaper. Otherwise build your houses out of nice, natural materials that are also excellent insulators like solid wood (NOT particle board), clay brick, and stone. This depends on resource availability in your area. Be sure to position windows and landscaping to maximize sunlight in the winter and minimize in the summer while using building materials that absorb heat like slate floors for the winter-facing windows. Vigilantly minimize insulation leaks and setup a regular inspection schedule once every year or few. Also be sure to allow for good airflow during the summer and try to design the house so that hot air will flow out of the house and pull in cooler air from something like earth tubes in the ground.
Think creatively in your house design if you want to maximize energy efficiency. Also don't forget what's ecologically friendly is also friendly for the people living inside!
Also, you may want to consider purchasing a fuel cell generator (or more) that is owned and maintained by the community. These are highly reliable and keep your community out of the hands of greedy power monopolies that rely on high-energy sources of power that create lots of pollution and are extremely inefficient in down converting energy from what you'd get in a power plant to what you use in your home.
If possible, plan the wiring system so that new or upgraded cabling can be run to the units in future. Plan for conduit with access and pull points, or an accessible wiring tray in attic, etc.
As a start, I would run to each residence:
1- phone quad cable (plain ole phone system)
1- CAT 5 or 6 (data, local network, internet)
1- Coax (RG-59) for cable TV
If budget allows or if the wiring can't be later accessed for service, I would run 2 of each for redundancy.
I don't think the current wireless neighbourhood solutions are worth the hassle or as reliable or secure as wire. Wire will give better service longer.
I personally don't think data over powerlines will be very successful until all AC-powered equipment is built or modified to not load the data, or generate noise at the data frequencies.
There wasn't anything in his original post that said that Canadians weren't americans.
That being said, I'd agree that Holland is a great country. It was a lot prettier than I imagined, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that it "would be the envy of all Americans". The weather kind of sucks most of the year for starters.
There are lots of nice countries in the Americas, and there are lots of nice countries in Europe. Each one has something different to offer.
Interestingly, I found France to be the most wired country I've visited. EVERYTHING in France is online. It's amazing. Holland might be similar, but I never lived there.
I wish that this wiring entire neighborhoods concept would take hold in other developing countries where they are building the infrastructure right now. It doesn't cost much more to do it right at the onset. It costs a fortune to come back and do it later..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I can vouch for this approach. Our city has been wired this way.
It's really good. Down time has been about 4 1/2 hours over two years.
There is Internet, 'phone and Cable TV ( Which I don't take ).
Commercially, from the point of view of the Telco, it's been a flop, but for us users it's just great. The Telco thought they would get far more TV users than have actually signed up.
...specifically speaking plastic smurf tubes aka conduit. Don't debate over fiber versus twisted pair, allow for either or both.
To each home run two or three unpopulated tubes to a central wiring area (I prefer a 1st floor closet or under a stairwell, anywhere that dinky 16" space between exterior studs). This would be in addition to a separate run for power (keep away from telephone/twisted pair).
Have the houses go to a central wiring pot in the street/block, and from there a more central wiring pot and so on. When you are ready to begin offering service, push a CAT 6e cable down the tube to intitially get everyone on, say, standard 10/100 network. If VoIP isn't happening, a second CAT-5/6 will provide your phone. Later one, you can replace the switch to upgrade everyone to gigabit on the same cable. There's talk of even faster twisted pair connections so I think it's clearly the way to go. But, fast forward a few years, and suddenly everything is fiber? Well, push one of those down too.
Here's the best part...competition. If some ISP comes along as wants to offer service, lease them a tube. You get income from leasing them tubes that would otherwise be unoccupied. The ISP gets instant customers who would otherwise not pay the cost of installtion themselves or not be economically viable if the streets had to be trenched. It another ISP comes along and wants to offer service, they can too, which ultimately is what is best for the homeowner.
Where I live, we have a choice of cable TV and phone provides...which is extremely rare in most settings. As a result, we have much lower prices and better features since the two companies know they can't just shaft their customers endelessly or they will just jump ship to the other guy.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
At our house, which we built in 2001, anywhere you find RJ11, you'll find two of them. Along with two RJ45 connections. Everything's run over Cat 5e (you'd probably want to go with Cat6 now.).
The network comes together to a patch panel on a small rack in a central room. From the patch panel, they connect to a 24 port switch that a friend got cheap at a going-out-of-business auction.
Works like a dream, except the occasional miswired jack that we're still finding.
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One benefit of shared IT is the ability to provide smart water conservation and irrigation.
By tying the rain override together you can easily apply the weather forecast to the rain override and avoid unnecessary watering.
Most semi-smart irrigations use a real time rain detector which is better than nothing - but the best that can be done is actuall forecasted weather.
There may be other benefits - such as seriously secure home burglary systems (not the dial up kind that can be so easily cut off from outside the building)
AIK
It wasn't hard - the framing was up (this was a remodeling job), they had put in the plywood, but no stucco or drywall yet. I had prior experience doing runs with CAT-5, and purchased half a dozen spools, a pair of termination and test kits, and a mess of jacks/faceplates. A drill is mandatory, and of course, you have to come back after they put in the drywall and paint to finish terminating each drop. I think the biggest benefit was that I did the telephone lines at the same time, so instead of having everything strung together (the way the electrician would have done it, to save wire), I ran the phone lines like I did the ethernet - everything from the port to a patch panel. Theoretically, I can put in a PBX without any wiring changes (I do have a Vonage box for a second line wired in next to my switch and patch panel.)
After a lot of thinking, meeting, and planning, we decided that while we had the resources to install some sort of community network (we were looking at getting our own DSLAM and doing our our DSL installation), we didn't have a large enough subscriber base to enable us to keep such a network maintained.
Instead, we were agressive with the local cable franchise holder and are now starting to get broadband installed in our community. While having our own cable plant may have saved us a few dollars, we don't have the headaches of keeping a system up and running.
The one thing that we don't get with this approach is a private subnet for our community; something that many of us would like to have for all sorts of reasons. I've managed to get myself politically active on this issue and the next time our local cable franchise is up for renegotiation, private neighborhood subnets will be proposed and discussed.
wherever I go, there I am.
I live in a similar sized neighborhood (24 houses) in the US. Frustrated by the lousy local cable TV internet service, I looked into getting a T1 into the neighborhood, and hooking everyone up myself.
As it turns out, the cost is not that much less than cable internet or DSL. Not counting labor, maintenance, and technical support, the cost for a wireless setup would be about $25/month per household. That sounds pretty good, but since then, DSL has arrived on the scene at $35 a month, and cable internet has both dropped in price and service improved, because of the competition. It seems like a homebrew network would still be cheaper, but it's only $10 a month cheaper. It also involves bringing all the homeowners together and getting them to agree on the plan, and doesn't count maintenanace costs. What happens if I move? Who will they call? How much will it cost? They're still enthusiastic about the idea, but I'm not sure it's so good.
About the satellite...
You can't just split digital satellite. It requires multiswitches, which are a lot more expensive than your run-of-the-mill coax splitter.
If you already knew this, just ignore my post and let it be to help the newbies. (I've seen too many times where someone puts a regular RF aplitter on their DSS line ans wonders why it won't work...)
BTW...anyone know where I can get a large (16 or more port) multiswitch? I want to wire the whole house in a way that is 2 tuner TiVo-ready.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
I work with this product and it kicks ass http://www.spherecom.com/ I also think their is a open source product in the works. Short and sweet!
Sig: BEEeeeP,,Please press pound, so I can get on with my fucking life!
I assume that if you are seroiusly considering this that you have some experience doing this kind of work...if not, trust me, you're better off not doing it...but if you must, here are some things to consider...
You will want a way to get easy access to the cable. You will need to replace cable from time to time for what ever reason and you need some way to get in there. What you will need to do is run some kind of conduit (2 or 3 inch PVC pipe should work)...and you will need junctions to access broken connections and perform upgrades/maintenence (about one every 100 feet should work). These junctions should be big enough that you can get a hand through or stick a vaccum/blower into...the conduit will fill with water even if it is capped...
You will also need to decide what kind of cable to use...if you use Cat-5, prepare for major maintenence costs...lightning and shorts DO happen and although it will happen with anything that is in the ground, it will happen even more with copper...if you lay copper, there's some real expense here...you also have to design your conduit so that there are no sharp turns (I think about 20 degrees is the max angle that you are supposed to go with fibre)...this means that you will have to really think about your layout...lay string where you plan to dig and decide where switches will be located for each home...you will have to miss gas, water, sewer, and underground power lines when you design the network. The things to keep in mind are that string is cheap and you want a good way of maintaining the physical network or all of the money spent goes to waste.
The other concern with laying physical cable on someone's property is that while everyone might be friends now, it takes one bad neighbor to skrew your network. If someone moves into your neighbor's house and says you can't run cable on his property, then you have to redesign that portion of the network...
Now, if I've scared you away from the idea of laying physical cable, you have one more option...wireless (802.11a is probably a good technology to look into...not as many consumer electronics are using 802.11a frequencies), but you have to realize that there are limitations and repeaters are not cheap. Each house would probably need a repeater...With wireless, you also have to make sure that you follow your local laws regarding the particular technology you plan to use. Meaning that if you get a neighbor that complains that your network is interfering with their radio/TV reception, they could shut down the network. The other problem with wireless is that you get terible latency on the edges of your network...
If you are serious about this, and you will have to be, there is a lot of things that you are going to have to worry about, Local standards building codes, carrier restriction Legislation etc. that you will have to be on top of before you start.
You will also need a services distribution point, one that every one in the netwrok will be comfortable with it has to be lockable and its environment managed.
I think that the wiring within the houses is out side the question, so I will assume that the wiring within the housing is not issue and that you will have a distribution point within each house.
I would probably suggest a high performance sheilded twisted pair cable. Lets go with siemons TERA solution. The sheilding reduces the amount of problems from running adjacent to high voltage cabling, and the increased performance of a 1200Mhz+ type solution will allow enough bandwith for quite a while 10+Gigabit over this cable is quite believable (2pr Gigbit is already happening with this stuff). If you run 2 or 3 of these to each house (inside p.v.c. conduit, with pits, drainage angle etc.) It would allow you with a great deal of flexability, even the sharing of pay-tv services through the use of set top boxes etc. It is my understanding that ScUTP is quite popular in europe (especially germany) so this cable would be easy to find, so installers to do it wouldn't be all that difficult either.
Just so you don't think I am a wack job with talk of strange cables beyond Cat 6, I design these things all day. And although Cat 7 and 8 aren't ratified yet the leading edge companies are putting out products that comply with the current stipulated terms. History says that those requirements get easier only, not harder.
I've got fiber. I live in japan and it costs about 90 bucks a month here. Here's a gallery with High res images of the installation: http://blacklinux.com/pages/public/computers/bflet s/
This site is run out of my house. The fiber comes into a linux box running PPPoE. That's my IPTABLES firewall. Inside there is my web server and file server. It's fast and it's stable. This would be a great option for a network like you want, but you have to see if it's availible in your area.