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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.
Motorola Canopy (wireless) can fit the bill for the Internet part. Very fast set up. High speed. Relatively cheap. Good coverage.
Don't dig. You'll probably hit a gas line anyway.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
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!
It should be "The Netherlands".
;-)
And I just assume everyone loves The Netherlands. Well, at least the softdrugs policy
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
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.
you might want to check out the PON stuff by all optic. probably a little pricy for what you are doing, but it fits the bill.
http://www.alloptic.com/
"Where ever you go, there you are"
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
I work for a contruction company that did just this a few years back. We built a 700+ home retirement community in the US. We partnered with a local Cable TV/Internet provider. The cable company installed all the in-ground components (just a normal Cable TV network plant) and provided both Cable TV and Broadband Internet Access.
As far as telephone and radio - I am sure your local companies could prove helpful.
Coding my way to the next BSOD!
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?
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
Slashdotters love the legalised prostitution.
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!
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...
I work for a local telecom, and we have several kinds of last-mile infrastructure, including both Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) and Fiber To The Home (FTTH). Either way, each home gets a Residential Service Unit (RSU), which mounts on the side of the house, which separates out the fiber or coax into cable TV, Ethernet, and POTS jacks. Fiber is extremely expensive to deploy, which is due largely to the fiber transceivers. As a last-mile medium, fiber is greatly overhyped. Hybrid Fiber-Coax, which is what most cable-modem-ready cable companies have in the ground, can support any conceivable service, including voice (RF modulated or VoIP), data, and cable, all for a much lower cost. This uses "fiber to the curb", then coax the rest of the way. Especially if you're trying to design a scalable prototype, consider HFC rather than FTTH.
Speaking personally and not for my employer.
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.
Unless this is a brand new construction, TV, radio, and phone are already laid.
Cable/sat/broadcast for TV, on air radio, current phone lines...
If this is a new construction, partner with the phone and cable companies. They can do it cheaper, better, longer than a one off by you.
If all you're doing is building in internet access (and possibly some of those other services (on top of), wireless or powerline delivery would seem to be your best options, Unless you personally want to support the hassles of underground fiber cables for xx years.
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.
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
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.
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
Here's thought: Run CB cable to each house. Use a BNC Y adapters to split the cable at each house. Wrap the y adapters in waterproof tape. Plug in a 802.11g router into the CB cable. Since this is a closed system with proper shielding the 802.11 shouldn't have much of a distance limitation.
You could use old BNC network adapters but I figure you could better performance out of 802.11g devices. Also the cable should be pretty cheap. Especially if you get it in bulk.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I remember reading an article about DIY DSL here on slashdot a long time ago. I did a simple google search and found an article about a neighbourhood in colorado. verizon wouldn't give them DSL, so they did it themselves.
here's an article about them
and this is the Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative
i know there's also software that can do DSL with nothing but an old soundcard and two copper wires. i don't know where it is, or if it's still maintained though.
cheers, and good luck.
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.
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.
The starting point is to work out what you want to do ... it's nice to grab the "quick list" but without a clear spec you'll bury yourself in detail.
Communications Needs - Is there a lifeline service involved (ie, does the dialtone need to be six-nines even if the Internet access isn't?). What's the regulatory regime surrounding phones in the Netherlands? Do you want to centralise services (eg mail server, Web cache) or just access? What about power backup?
Physical layer distribution - what's the tradeoff between wireless, fibre and copper? Does mobile phone coverage enter the equation?
Interconnect - you'll want phone calls to reach the outside world - have you planned for this? How do you get permission to send calls to "traditional" carriers?
Moving signals around is easy. Understanding what you want to do before you spend the money is hard...
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.
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.
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 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
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.
i .com/fsoalliance/
You can ditch the fiber but keep the optics. Free Space Optics (FSO) has been around for a long time. Despite being somewhat obscure, it is a very mature technology with a lot of things going for it. It provides fiber level bandwidth without the cost of digging up the ground to lay down fiber. Rapid deployment and high mobility can save not only money but time as well. You didn't mention how far apart the residences are in the neighborhood, but unless you're rural and very spread out, FSO may perform satisfactorily with allowance for bad weather. Bad weather being fog and scintillation.
Fog is a problem if you're near the coast or a large body of water that can produce a lot of mist. A heavy mist can really hammer the signal by several dBs over long distances on the order of a mile/kilometer. Currently it is the largest obstacle faced by permament/semi-permanent FSO implementations. Atmospheric scintillation is the phenomenon that makes stars twinkle at night. It is caused by variations in atmospheric temperature that change the index of refraction an optical signal encounters as it zooms to its destination. This problem, however, is more or less solved by making the signal take parallel paths to the reciever.
you may be interested in the following companies among others.
tellaire
terabeam
fsona
airfiber
lightpointe
industry news and references:
http://www.freespaceoptics.org/
http://www.wca
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
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.
Google IT: "low power" "spread spectrum" "Line of sight" microwave
Line-of-Sight (LOS) Wireless, WiFi, 802.11x,
http://www.commweb.com/showArticle.jhtml?ar
http://www.ieee80
NOTE: Avoid using omni directional antennas, consider per-session (call, email, download,
EUROPE RACES AHEAD OF USA IN TECHNOLOGY!
This is a romantic return of technology to ITS place in our future.
http://www.zeppelinfan.de/html-seiten/de
http://www.flug-revue.rotor.com/FRheft/FRH
Aerial platforms provide an ideal way of delivering broadband communications services. They can be considered as a hybrid technology, combining the best of terrestrial and satellite delivery. High altitude platforms - either solar powered airships or planes, typically flying at 17-22km. no delay, no bad weather,
I hope this helps - OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Ok, here is my solution going from the user level to the core of your network. Infrared port on PC to Infrared Network Gateway module setup in each room (I'm not sure these exist, but work with me here). INGM has RS530 serial connection back to Cisco 6509 switch. (Make sure you put redundant Sup720's for native IPv6 switching.) If security is important you can use some KIV-19 or KG-195 bulk encryption devices on your serial connection. Oh yeah, you'll need some kind of stratum 1 clock source to injected timing into your INGM. We don't want any slips on that line. Then to connect everybody's 6509, I would run some coax and fire up some Token Ring. I have similar setup in my duplex and it works like a charm.
Fiber TO the neighbourhood,
;)
ONE fiber2cat5-transceiver-thingy,
routers and cat5 IN the neighbourhood.
My guess is it's cheaper (and we're dutch
who invented the iron wire?
the dutch. two men were fightng over 5 cents.
Privacy is terrorism.
...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
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
In all, Holland is a great country
No it isnt, cause Holland is not a country. Holland is a province (well 2 provinces, north and south holland), the country is the Netherlands.
Eg, Philips do _not_ have their headquarters in Holland (it's in Eindhoven, province of Limburg), the Dutch TT is _not_ in Holland (it's in Drenthe), Utrecht is _not_ in Holland, etc..
Holland => a province
the Netherlands => the country
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
No, I'm speaking of the overall running and maintenance of the thing.
It appears they have a good community of people who all get along with each other. In such a case, it could be run on a private, local basis.
Until some assholes move in, and demand the world.
You've never been in an HOA with a couple of asshole control freaks? Not pleasant. No mater what you do, they will be pissed off at something.
Rick at Cable System Services. www.cablesystemservices.com They're an excellent small to midsize company that could provide anything from a turnkey system down to any individual step along the way - walkout, strand draft, design, construction, and/or testing. They also do consulting and they're world wide. I used to work there (Eagan, MN)until I moved my family back east (NY) to my old stomping grounds - I helped work on a number of projects just like yours during my time there.
If we actually had info on the physical topology of your community it would make things easier.
But, here's what I would suggest:
Each house should have multiple pairs of dry copper running to the SAME CO. You can probably use this as your physical medium for all 30+ homes, using VDSL or "HDSL T1/E1 Modems" (ADC Makes these).
I'd find cheap VDSL ethernet Bridge/modem (which is what they are anyways) setting up one in each residence, then you can find rack mount vdsl "concentrators" or chassis which mux all of these together and give you a few ethernet ports for uplink purposes. Either that or you can use use another vdsl modem on the telephone CO side and connect them all to a standard switch (a cheap cisco 3548-XL, or a bunch of cheap 16port switches uplinked to eachother).
tut systems makes these (which ived used in the setup i've descibed) http://www.videotele.com/index.cfm Note that there's actually a bunch of competition in this VDSL (last mile) market and prices are always fluctuating. I've found single tut vdsl modems (good for hundreds of feet, 1.5mbits over a pair of copper) go for 20 bucks a peice.
I would advise against 2.4ghz wireless as it sucks. Just trust me on this. Anyone who's recommending setting up a Metro LAN on this is talking out of their ass and doesn't realize how shitty this would be (i've seen it, CDMA collisions out the ass, 200pps limit for the whole friggin network, all of your traffic cleartext, one user with the right equipment can shut it down, lmr200 or 400 cable is expensive, 2.4 sucks thanks.)
Keep to the KISS rule, use cheap CAT5/6 or pre-existing infrastucture if at all possible.
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.
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
...hire one. Stick to what you know.
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
If you leave a string in each run, changes are much easier. Do not use cotton, use something which won't rot.
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.
We investigated Lightpointe's solution between 2 buildings at about 150 yards apart.
Bottom line... at an excess of $35K USD for a pair, we decided to dig and run fiber at a cost of about $12K.
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.
Ronja. The GPL'd Free Space Optical link with the $100 price tag
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.
First of all, I must congratulate you on your ambitions! It is too bad that more people are not interested in developing and living in intentional communities such as the one in which you are now involved. Having said that, the most important thing for you to do, before you even begin to consider the technology that you will use to deliver various forms of information and telecommunications is to define the requirements that your solution, whatever it is, will be judged against. This will require you to develop consensus with all residents on issues like ownership of the system, maintenance responsibilities, initial capital budget and on going operational expenses. Realize that 30 subscribers is probably too many to be served on an "ad hoc" basis (unless everyone is fairly technically literate and is willing to share "on-call" responsibility) and too few to warrant a dedicated 24x7 network operations center.
Given this situation, you may find it helpful to contract out some or all of the design, build, operate, and maintain phases of the project to an established ISP in the Netherlands(xs4all, as it is owned by KPN, may or may not be interested in such an arrangement, you may have more luck with smaller competitive providers - like Demon, or perhaps even larger players like Versatel or Wanadoo). Another approach may be to "rent a NOC." This is not as far fetched as it sounds, when I lived in the Netherlands a few years back, there were quite a few experienced network engineers who took on part-time or on-call projects for extra cash. If you go this route, it would actually be better to contract with people outside of the community, so that they could monitor the state of your network from an external perspective. You could contact a company like BaseN, for example, if you would like to try this approach.
As far as the design itself, you will probably find that the monthly operating expense will be higher than if each home individually subscribed to a complement of traditional services, at least in their most basic form. Of course, you will be able to offer additional services that are either prohibitively costly for individuals, or even unavailable to consumers. You can craft a set of applications that could be specifically targeted to the needs of your community (rsync'ed gentoo mirrors, community IM and location services, VoIP centrex services, and so on). These services will help form the basis of the requirements document mentioned above.
Next, I would work from the external connectivity to the distribution of those resources. I assume that Internet connectivity is important to you and your community. If this is the case, then the connectivity requirements are probably on the order of at least 4Mbps. If network availability is a major concern then this could be provided by 2 E1 lines, diversely routed from different providers, probably to different locations within your community. It is important to realize here that this implies that your community would become in effect an ISP. If you are really ambitious, you could pull a circuit into the Amsterdam Internet Exchange and attempt to find some providers willing to peer with you.
Now, to answer the question that you originally asked, there are a number of different technologies that you can use to distribute your network. As with everything else, there are tradeoffs involved; that is, there is no right answer (but many "wrong" answers). IMHO, the best tradeoffs would be found in xDSL technology for two reasons. First, it is a relatively proven and mature technology. Second, it works over just about any reasonable twisted pair technology. On the other hand, if you will be distributing television as well, you may find Euro-DOCSIS cable modem technology appealing. This will allow you to make use of the coax infrastructure that you will need to install anyway, but you may find that CMTS (cable modem termination systems) are initially mor
You might get away with CAT 5e for the in-house wiring, but you need to consider CAT6 or multi-mode fiber for connections between switches. I just ren into this recently:
CAT 5 - 10Mhz Ethernet
CAT 5e - 100Mhz Ethernet
CAT 6 - Gigabit Ethernet
And don't scoff at the idea of gigabit inside the dwellings, either. I saw a 5 port gigabit switch for (i think) about 89.95 (US) the other day.
If you run gigabit-capable (CAT 6 or Multi-mode Fiber) from dwellings to central switch, then the resident can put in a 10/100 switch switch with a Gigabit uplink or a regular gigabit switch. Of course, there is going to be bottle-necking at the central switch, but if you put in a few OC3's maybe no one will notice...
At any rate, this sounds like a fun project.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Because raving nationalism is great as long as you're not from the US, right??
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