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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!
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...
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been wondering why there isn't a good "do it yourself community fiber network" howto, at least as far as I know. I've been experimenting with fiber as a hobby for the last few months just for fun. Its amazing what you can find on ebay.
A few observations:
Single mode is vastly superior to multimode in terms of both range (20-100 km vs 2km) and theoretical maximum throughput (terabits per second versus gigabits per second).
On the other hand, single mode is harder to work with, and the end point equipment is more expensive. A new 100mbps fiber-to-copper ethernet converter is about $150 for MM and about $250 for SM. Gigabit gear is more expensive, but not terribly prohibitive.
The fiber itself is cheap (one article I read indicated that the wholesale cost of SM fiber is about $15 a km). All the cladding and armor they put on it makes it expensive (A dollar or two per foot for direct-bury cable with a dozen or so fiber strands).
It takes 2 fibers to make a connection, usually. This is called duplex.
It is possible to run multiple connections on different wavelengths. This is called wavelength division multiplexing. DWDM systems sometimes have over a hundred separate channels.
I don't know much about durability.
Ethernet over fiber may be good for small networks, but it requires active electronics (and reliable power) at each junction. Depending on application, this may not be a problem.
Take a look at fiberdyne's webpage if you're curious about approximate equipment costs. They seem to sell almost everything related to fiber. Here's another page with a decent fiber tutorial.
-jim
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.