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Ask Slashdot: Provisioning Internet For Condo Association?
An anonymous reader writes "I am on a committee to evaluate internet options for a medium sized condo association (80 units — 20 stories) in a major metropolitan area (Chicago). What options are out there? What questions should one ask of the various sales representatives? How should access be distributed within the building (wireless APs, ethernet cable). Does it make sense to provide any additional condo wide infrastructure (servers, services)? How much should it cost? How much dedicated bandwidth is required to support a community of this size?"
If you're asking all those questions, you should not be in that committee.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Step 1: hire a competent network engineer who isn't you.
I would not provide additional services. You really want to compete for web hosting/email services with the millions of other providers. The only exception though would be co-location. Build a few extra racks into your plan and let members rent space in them.
You need to hire a professional.
Somebody who's capable of -being at the location- and looking directly at the requirements and making recommendations. And then, they'll some ideas about where to go from there, because it doesn't look like you do. (You do have some requirements at least, don't you?)
We could ask you every little detail of your situation, and you could hang around in the comments looking for the answers. Time consuming and counterproductive.
Can I have your job? Apparently you are not equipped to be doing it, if you're polling random internet "experts" (of unknown skill level or experience) to do it for you.
If I can't have your job, then outsource your job to a consulting IT firm, get some design and cost bids, and pick one based on the committee's overall most important metric (be it cost, reliability, etc.)
Forget the servers and such locally. Do not want. That much I'm willing to help you out with.
Most of the people who want Internet service probably already have it.
If you're looking at consolidating that then you'd want to talk to a network engineer. That person would be able to tell you what your options were (wireless between floors probably won't work well) and how much to expect to pay for them and what kind of throughput to you will likely see.
There's a lot more to this than just asking slashdot what wires to run. Once it's set up, someone will have to keep it working. And slashdot won't be able to help you with that.
Hire a company that does this as a business. Hire them to set it up and contract them to keep it running.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Note that I only have experience as a user of internet services.
If you have the choice at all, please go for wired distribution. Wireless only if the association cannot afford the wire pulls. Wireless is subject to so many interference sources and there's nothing you can really do to fix it if "The Internet is Down!" or more likely, the high-definition video feed starts buffering because of someone's microwave oven.
You may also be able to distribute over cable TV cables and cable modems. Either because you made a deal with a cable provider, or because you purchased the same equipment they use on the server-side. Could be tricky though, as I assume the cable TV people don't approve of competition and won't make it easy.
Speaking of high-definition video feeds, you may as well assume that at prime time hours at least half and maybe all of the units are watching HD Netflix, Hulu, Youtube or some other video source. That is 7 Mbps each, minimum, right there.
... asking those questions to both sides, and negotiating between them.
It would have been a good idea to agree a general frame of reference first - such as how much should it cost, and do people expect WiFi.
On the technical side, there are only a few interesting questions.
1) Do you need wired internet? (IPTV works much better, for example).
2) What kind of services can you reasonably provide locally?
And I think the answer is file hosting (mind the back-up) and IPTV. You could also interface with the building, for example doing CCTV recordings and controlling HVAC (maybe even remotely?), but that's a whole different can of worms.
But as I said, you have to ask these questions to the people who foot the bill, not to slashdot.
Get in touch with major providers in the area and discuss what they would need to provide their service to the people in the building. Then pick the "best" two and negotiate.
But I completely agree with other posters: If you have to ask these questions you better should get someone who knows what he's doing.
I was involved in my Condo community and they gave me permission to run Ethernet wires (CAT-5e) in the walls with some number of drops in each unit depending on the size, and you could add more via a cost per port.
We then had a single shared high-speed connection that the whole community shared via a small server in an equipment closet running Linux. This was some years ago (14 now?) that we started it, and I'm not living there anymore, but I occasionally hear from people still there who say it is still working well for them.
The cost, even with our overhead in, ended up being like 1/2 or less that of commercial connections for all the members.
We DID add wireless, but frankly, wireless for lots of users is overrated. I.e. it just doesn't get the level of service that you think it will. Just put in the ethernet cables.
Erich Boleyn
Run fiber to each condo. It goes further than ethernet, does not get/cause RF interference, can be upgraded easier, and with the correct equipment can even have the TV on the same fiber.
I wouldn't do anything fancy.
The ISPs are very happy to offer service individually to residents. Rather then having some building wide system, let residents work it out for themselves.
In my building, we have cable and DSL. The cable is handled entirely by the cable company and the DSL is handled entirely by the phone company.
The homeowner's association pays to maintain the telephone box but mostly it doesn't pay for anything.
This isn't a bad thing. Residents pay no more for internet service then a home owner would and no one is forced into an agreement they don't want. If I didn't want internet service, I could cancel it and pay nothing. If there were a building agreement then I'd be paying whether I wanted to pay or not.
Keep it simple and let residents work it out on their own. Let the cable company worry about the logistics.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
be sure to redirect all outgoing HTTP requests to Last Measure.
Run a separate wire to each condo. If they want wireless, they can put
in their own wireless router and deal with their own problems.
The kind of "wire" depends on how the internet arrives at the condo.
A talk with your ISP or ISPs is in order.
It would be nice if the ISP was to feed each wire separately, and then ... 95% of the problems will
you are free of any headaches. Apportioning bandwidth among
tenants is a nightmare, you will get complaints, lawsuits, people
demanding their rent back, etc. And
come from only 5% of your tenants.
don't. let people get it on their own. From a troubleshooting standpoint, who's going to be there to fix it when something goes on the Friday before a holiday weekend, or someone needs the keys to let someone else into some place to do something to fix something....basically, let the big boys like ATT or cable do their thing. you're not going to save that much money, and in the long run, it's just going to be more of a headache.
Seriously - the condos aren't already wired for cable coax and phone service? I would be stunned if any building that size didn't already have the basic coax and copper infrastructure already there.
What have condo owners done for broadband in the last ten years? Gone without? Run off dialup? This seems inconceivable in the middle of a major metro area.
If for some insane reason there is no coax get a quote to have it pulled to all the units. It will be expensive and you'll want a qualified installer who knows how to build coax plant of that size.
Do it, put some volonteer work in it, and you will be amazed how cheap internet access becomes. Probably under 1/4 of a regular subscription. The one big gotcha: watch out for rogue DHCP servers. People buy crappy DLINK, put the upload cable in a white plug instead of the yellow one and you can go around knocking on doors to check 50 routers. So make sure your switches are smart enough to drop rogue DHCP packages. Use cheap ethernet wherever possible. I would avoid homebrew servers, they will just take your time and lead to support calls. Let people use Gmail/hotmail whatever. The one exception might be a SQUID server to get more bang out of your internet buck. You also going to have to come up with a Bittorrent policy. Is it ok for one household to upload 50 GB of porn?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Ignore the children. They're just being snarky as well as useless.
I've set up an ISP or two that have had thier challenges...
Buildings of that height often have communication racks in place, so start with the telephone service provider, as well as the cable provider.
The cable provider is the most likely candidate to start with. The infrastructure is already in place. Additional services beyond a data connection can be as diverse as your imagination. If you see it on the net, chances are good you can have a private version for your building, including web pages, email services, etc. Typically, a sales rep will jump at a business set up for all the tennants and the internet service can be included into the rent or dues, and it can be a selling point as well.
Options:
- One big switch in the basement vs one small switch on each floor.
One big switch is more expensive, but gives you line-rate between any two condo's.
This means that condo 1 (1e floor) and condo 41 (floor x) Can transfer files an Gbps without affecting anyone else.
Small switch on each floor, means the cables are shorter (you have a 100m max length to deal with)
But several high load transfers will affect others (what is the expected traffic matrix?)
- One device allowed vs multiple devices allowed.
If only 1 device is allowed each condo will probably end up installing a small router.
This can be done as part of the installation. One router (with integrated 4-8 port switch) per condo.
If multiple devices are allowed, make sure you have a redundant DHCP server with a big pool of addresses.
A condo may have multiple PC's and when you use wireless in you're condo the smartphones will also use ip-addresses.
- One IP-address for the building vs network range.
When you have only a single IP-address for the whole building (with a router in each condo?) you will have double-NAT going on.
Expect a lot of trouble with this setup if some-one uses more exotic protocols and/or legacy protocols (http will be fine)
Also check the local law. You may be required by law-enforcement to link traffic from 6 months ago to a certain condo.
With a range (/25 ==> 128 IP-addresses) You can assign a dedicated IP-address to each condo.
And still have some left for a shared wireless infrastructure.
- No redundancy vs redundancy.
If a cable between floor 5 & 6 breaks, do you want traffic to still be possible or not?
- Security
When you go with a shared DHCP server, the entire building will basically be a LAN.
Which means microsoft file-sharing protocols will work between condo's.
Do you want you're neighbors to see you're drives?
- Private server.
Do you want to be able to run a private web/mail/file server in you condo?
Questions to ask:
The above options to the members of the committee.
You must have a basic idea on what is wanted/needed before you start talking to salesman.
(It is easier for both parties + you tend to get a better deal)
At least from my perspective the standard for a new building of that type today is usually fiber to each apartment, then a converter box that offers TV, Internet and phone for so called triple play. Then you would normally pull a fiber cable to each apartment and have a magic box that breaks it out into the various services. I assume you don't have a cable TV provider today? Because if you're already wired for cable, hooking up cable modems is clearly the easiest way to go. And if they won't give you a nice price, threaten to switch providers for everything. I've never heard of an entire apartment building being supplied by wireless APs, sure people can set up their own APs but there's always been a wire to the wall. It might be a bit cheaper to retrofit to an existing building but I wouldn't recommend it, hotels and such have struggled a lot to get good reception in every room.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I work for an ISP that specializes in MDU offerings. I've seen a lot of successful deployments, and have torn out a lot of horrible deployments.
Don't do a wireless distribution. The majority of Tenants will have wireless routers and it will cause a lot of noise and issues. Optimal and scalable would be something like fiber between floors and Cat-5/6 to the units. However budget / infrastructure can be limiting. Cable and DSL are viable options, as long as the head-end is on location.
Ask the company how they intend prevent unit A from accessing the resources of unit B.
Make sure that they do bandwidth shaping on location, and that it is done per unit.
It doesn't make sense to add other services.
Dedicated bandwidth really depends on what the HOA members want. A good oversubscription is 10:1 so if 80 units want 10mpbs, 80mbps dedicated should be sufficient. Have the companies provide some sort of SLA on the bandwidth of the main feed and individual units. It's hard to predict how many tenants watch Netflix back-to-back, until the network is in place.
I may be biased, but I would stear clear of the major players (Time Warner, Comcast, CenturyLink, etc), and go with a local company. You'll get better service, and your solution will be customized to your complex. I would imagine you have a property management company, ask them for reccomendations.
Wire all your homes to a central point, bring the telcos to the same point and connect. Total freedom of isp, always wired up.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The way we handle this for our twenty building complex is by contract with a local cable provider. Every unit is required to pay for extended basic cable. It is billed as part of the maintenance fee. Each unit can subscribe to premium channels, very high speed internet, and phone over cable as well. This leaved the burden of equipment and band width totally upon the cable company. And since I take several premium channels as well as phone and high speed internet as a bundle it is far less expensive than hiring a phone company to install two lines, one for data, and another for voice. And my speed is probably greater than double that of a DSL phone system and weather does not have an effect on my HD TV services.
If you do not have a good reason, stick to dsl/cable from your ISP. wiring a 20 story building with ethernet could be 10k+ not to mention the router and switches. plus you probably are going to need an IT guy on retainer.
Basically you cannot readilly know the splitup of your "customers", most probably at least 79 units will want Internet, but some might want a combo mobile+fixed, other a high end triple play and a third the cheapest dsl possible.
The "total" cost of triple play for all should not be more than 4000$ a month with free installation. (that would be the approximate price in most well connected cities if each customer buys its own).
Now the prices in the US tend to be too high, so their might be a rational for group negociation.
But in practice
Either you have fiber to the building and then you'd want to know what operator is handling this and make sure that they have a decent end user price, and that'll be the best offer.
Or you do not have, then the best option is to get your "customer" to sign a paper confirming that they want offer x:
Then you show it to all the operators and tell them that the first to commit to fiber to the building within 6 month will get the business, and if they do not make an offer you will use just to demonstrate that you are not happy, and will put in the internal rules of the condo that using their offer is not "nice"...
Most probably either a local cable operator, or one of the telco will think that it's worth its while to connect you.
good luck
In Sweden 'condo associations' are really common and LAN/Fiber installations as well.
My last 4 apartments all have had wired Internet connection of some kind. The absolute best solution so far is fiber to each apartment and from the wiring closet dual CAT6 to each room. Everything in my apartment runs TCP/IP- phone, network, TV, alarm-system (with cell backup), we don't even have a POTS-connection to the building.
In the building basement we got a wire closet that recives the big fat fiber from the local dark-fiber provider (actually the municpality). Due to the open net standard we got a wide range of providers in the network giving each apartment owner a choice of provider. If the fiber based providers isn't your cup of thé you can always go for a 4G solution which works excelent as well.
So my tip is to go for fiber to each apartment. Future safe and the price diffrence isn't that large.
My company does this in Oz. What we do is Greenfields estates, but we have also done brownfields retrofits. Company is wholesale only, open access.
Go with fibre, FTTH. Get an OLT setup, GPON, EPON, EPON whatever, have the gear in the basement and depending on your tastes, you can run an ONT to each apartment or if phone/internet only, you can share an ONT between two or more, might be able to get an RF splitter to each room, but meh.
I suggest an ONT per apartment. Go for the triple play. Find a company that would let others choose Internet and phone provider over the connection, cause once you are locked in and they are the sole provider, it can go tits up.
Once the fibre is done, you just need to upgrade the ends to get faster speeds. VDSL can work at short distances, but do it properly the first time.
When you have a high density condo, by pooling in their resources, members can actually get much better QoS
For example, 80 condos can make a deal with a leased line vendor and get a 1000mbps 1:1 connection.
Even if everybody is using their internet at the same time downloading torrents, you still have a 10mbps+ actually BW available to users.
Monthly cost of 1000mbps is in the ballpark of 500-1000$
Even if you take it as 1000$/month, we are talking about less than 20$ per condo, which is cheaper than the cheapest 10mbps unlimited ADSL plan from a DSL provider.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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A short brain dump;
Rule number One: Everything should be done in such a way, that it requires as little works as possible for the volunteers.
Let everything be hosted at a provider; email isn't a core service the same way it used to be since people use gmail, sms etc. Same with web servers. Only provide "pure" Internet access. Buy outside knowledge if necessary. We still run our own email servers and firewall, but that is because we are Linux freaks willing to invest the necessary time in such projects. It certainly helped the careerer of some of the volunteers that we ran things like DNS, email, Squid, Apache, firewall etc.
Install LAN cables. Install Coax for TV and radio if needed, set-up a separate TV committee if there is interest. Keep the cables as a separate investment. Not everybody wants (your) internet access since eg. their employer pays their present internet access, but every condo should be wired regardless if possible. Sell it as an investment that increase the property value.
Make sure the cable installer knows what they are doing. Buy outside help if needed.
For historic reasons our network is a NAT'ted LAN. Not sure it makes sense any more to be able to directly share resources between condos since eg. running you own game server is on its way out, so it may provide less hassle to simply isolate every LAN access. That also helps against some LAN scanning malware. As a minimum run intelligent switches that can firewall rogue DNS servers etc.
Have a charter or similar, that stipulate what can be done and can't be done with the network; IMHO, you should firewall the internet access pretty strict; don't allow people to host their own email or web servers, since eg. spambots spewing out spam mails from your LAN can cause all kinds of trouble for you (see rule number one).
Internet access is now considered an important utility; so spend some time on service monitoring; eg. if switch 4 is down, who should be informed, who should they call. Make sure the provider has a detailed page on service status, and they inform you when there is maintenance downtime.
After the first hurdles, things will settle down so the committee will get a more reasonable work load. The bonus of all the work is that we have had high speed, (low latency and fat pipes) Internet access for a very low price for more than a decade. It is also a good selling point that the condo have 100 mbit Internet access for $10 a month.
Hello, Here is an open source solution for precisely your case: https://www.epointsystem.org/trac/website/wiki/2010/10/30/13.20 I would recommend using Ubiquiti PicoStation M2HP for outdoors APs and TP-Link TL WR-1043ND for indoors ones. You can also connect some of your customers by Ethernet plugged in the switch of the WR-1043ND. For more info, please feel free to contact the authors at info@epointsystem.org
You may also be able to distribute over cable TV cables and cable modems. Either because you made a deal with a cable provider, or because you purchased the same equipment they use on the server-side. Could be tricky though, as I assume the cable TV people don't approve of competition and won't make it easy.
MoCA
It sounds like you're planning to build a LAN in your condo, rather than have each tenant obtain and be responsible for their own service. This will all have additional overhead since, if you have a building wide network, you will need an administrator to keep it under control and working properly. You will also be responsible for the incredibly stupid shit your tenants do on your network (viruses, copyright infringement, etc.)
The simplest method, from the property owner's perspective, is to let the occupants handle it all themselves. Not sure what your circumstances are (new construction? renovation of an existing building?) but set aside a medium sized room for utilities - usually in or near the same room that the electrical service comes in - that ISP companies can install their equipment. From that room, run maybe 3" conduits to a closet on each floor, and then 1.5" conduits from that closet to each unit. make sure the installing contractor leaves nylon cords in each conduit and they are all clearly labeled. In this way, when a tenant wants internet service X, the installing tech can run a cable of the appropriate type from his company's box to the space with absolutely minimal disturbance.
Each unit gets their own service. They can do pretty much whatever they want however they want it. They pay the bill directly for whatever level of service they want. You are not providing anything that requires maintenance or anything that exposes you to liability. Empty conduit is cheap, too, and future-proof in that you can pull anything you want through it - even if you decide to become your own mini-ISP in the future you can still go that route.
=Smidge=
As already mentioned, there's quite a few things you need to work out. In essence, you become your own ISP.
You can still try and use your leverage. Deliver each unit one network drop and rent out the resulting infrastructure to one or more ISPs, who'll then deliver to your tenants. Their investment is then limited to running fibre to the building. You do the installation and charge a bit for maintenance, but that overall can still be cheaper than a third party needing to run and maintain ADSL to each unit individually. You'd need "multi-play" kit to do the "unbundling", but it exists, it's even simply for sale. As an extra I'd probably want to add a community billboard or something, but that isn't even required.
Will you be providing metered or "all you can eat" bandwidth? If it's the former, people will bitch about unpredictable bills or quotas. If the latter, people will torrent as hard as they can and you had better get a lot of bandwidth.
I advocate metered bandwidth (at a reasonable price). It works out best for everyone, but you have to understand the reason why the industry has settled on the stupid "unlimited but not really" model.
80 units...
10 GB ethernet fibre to the basement. /23 public IP address block (est 5 per unit).
2 x 48 port gigabit switches running CAT 6 copper to each unit and OSPF to the ISP. Set each ethernet port to 100 MB speed for now, increase it in the future if you eventually increase your uplink to 100 GB.
That's it, nice and simple. 100 MB ethernet connection to each unit. Residents plug in their own AP or switch in their apartment.
If your association is full of tech heads (>50%) you could try to talk them into metro Ethernet.
If you are in a metropolitan area, you should be able to get a metro GbE Ethernet drop for around $5000 / month. Go straight to the top tier providers, probably your best bet is Level 3. Send me a message if you like, I know someone who does sales for them (not trying to plug, just being honest). Most of the competitors are just re-leasing Level 3, Comcast, etcetera's lines. Comes out to about $60-70 / month each unit, so it's not cheap. While 12 mbps per unit sounds like low DSL speeds, it would be a rarity to have more than 30-50% online pulling full bandwidth even during peak hours... unless absolutely everyone is heavy into Netflix and Hulu.
The downside, is that is before the other $5-10k or so of switching and routing equipment you need to regulate traffic and a few thousand more in line runs. You need to run at least one drop to each unit, possibly allow them to have it run to a utility closet or such and dropped into their own switch. I would really be looking at 2 drops per unit, one in a closet or bedroom, one in the living room.
Besides the obvious advantage of fully symmetric bandwidth, metro Ethernet never has any caps since it is a business class service. You could also roll a VoIP system in and have the installers pull the existing phone lines for their drops.
Level 3 is also in the business of selling virtualized cloud router service. The metro Ethernet drop from the DMARC goes straight to their hosted firewall, which you or they can manage to handle firewall, NAT, and routing of the resident drops. These are non-trivial, provider grade firewalls at that. I *think* they can handle the per port load balancing side of the equation, but I would have to check with my buddy just to be sure. The point is, you want to take as much maintenance and responsibility away from yourself as possible while getting the best quality and price of service.
All in all, it would be a great idea with a community that size to host a premium grade of service in house, but I suspect it is still a bit cost prohibitive. It would also add a small amount of legal protection for the residents should the RIAA or MPAA try to come after anyone. After all, it is 80 units behind a single IP. For resident privacy protection, your SLA could state that no logging be maintained except in the event of troubleshooting. I would verify with a lawyer that since it is community owned, that such lack of logging would be legal, since you are not an ISP.
Run the cable via the elevator shaft(s) and since there are only four units per floor install a WiFi AP or Repeater in the common hallway. The preferred cable in the elevator shaft is fiber optic. Within each unit a WiFi AP if a WiFI Repeater was installed in the common hallway. Each fiber run handles only four units so bandwidth should not be an issue except at the point of connection to the ISP's network.
Becoming an ISP is probably all kinds of not worth the hassle and then you have to deal with people who think they shouldn't have to pay for it and so on.
So go out to the people with right of ways in town and get them to submit bids to provide access. These will be the phone company and cable company for sure, but there might be others. In all likelihood their bids won't involve much, if any, cost to you just an allowance that they can run their cables around. They might want you to wire up the units themselves from their box, but that'll be it, and they might be willing to do that for you at a good price or for free.
In the condo I live in there is cable and phone so we can get Internet through either of those (and of course any companies that lease their lines). I like it because I can get some nice business class cable with static IPs and no bandwidth caps. Some of my neighbours I don't think even have Internet as there are a lot of vacation condos. We all get what we want.
Only thing special I'd do were I in charge of doing it now is solicit bids from other companies. I know of a couple ISPs in town that have some right of ways, and while they don't normally do residential stuff, maybe one of them would be interested in being a 3rd provider since they could run a single line and then have equipment on premises. However if I couldn't find one I wouldn't sweat it, I'd stick with phone and cable.
This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want from a condo association - a middleman that takes a cut of my fees and adds no value. I would rather contract directly with DSL or cable provider. That way if it breaks I don't have to call the condo offices (during business hours only, of course) to call the internet contractor (again, only reachable during business hours) to commence the finger-pointing.
I'm just a user, but it is a good idea to provide one IPv4 address to each flat. There are many protocols that require or benefit from peer-to-peer connectivity, including Skype, the Xbox and IM-based file transfer. These work with NAT, but they use UPNP, so either you have to provide UPNP port forwarding to all flats at once (a big clusterfuck) or an IP address to each. All those protocols do work around lame NATs by proxying, but this is slower and the applications sometimes indicate this to the user (so they can complain). Some "old-school" VPNs don't work with NAT.
On WiFi, the expectation is different, so you can provide either NATed or firewalled connections for WiFi (assuming you build both WiFi and wired nets).
If you build support for IPv6, you can delegate a subnet to each wired outlet, and use firewalled (drop all incoming, allow all outgoing) for wireless connections.
I would appreciate this setup greatly as a user, but I'm a geek, and "normal" people may not care that much. Still, the examples in the first paragraph are used by many people, so I think it's a fair point. (even better would be multiple public IPs per outlet, but that would just encourage noob users to get a switch instead of a router, which is bad. Windows is probably not ready for the "bare " internet yet)
Just give each apartment at least 1 phone line and let each person who wants internet access arrange it themselves. Extra phone lines would be a benefit as would trunking to put extra cables though later. Other than that don't get involved unless you really want to support everyone's equipment 24/7 and get the blame for every windows virus, every illegally downloaded movie, every botnet DDOS attack from cracked windows machine, and every child porn incident from 'your' network. You won't be able to provide cheaper service than the ISPs either unless you resell domestic ADSL which is against the terms and conditions.
The amount of hassle you will have putting a mini-ISP together will not be worth it. Leave running an ISP to the ISPs.
I once worked for a company that installed internet services for condos here in Florida. We would get business class Internet services from 2 local companies (by local I mean Comcast or Century link), get a router that supports dual WAN input with load balancing, and run Cat5e to the units where the owner provides their own wireless router. Keep in mind that if you do not block the incoming DHCP port on the client side via a managed switch you will get rogue DHCP servers for the building. This works very well and you should charge an extra $20-25 a month in HOA fees.
Good luck and farewell.
Use a Cisco Wireless solution. The whole setup using their Managed setup. Run Cat 6 everywhere, 2 runs to each location leave one in place for future. I would also run an extra cat6 to every unit and let them pay to have their builder add in runs to each room or the integrator to run to where the AV racks will be for each unit.
I would also add a good Cisco firewall and a transparent proxy cache server to reduce your POP load.
Call up any Cisco Certified dealers and they can give you a nice exact list of what you need and a price.
Dont even think of dinking around with consumer gear for this. And dont think you can get away without running wires.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In most areas where condos exist, the commercial ISPs will offer adequate DSL or cable services. This way, individual residents can make a decision about what service they want, and purchase the DSL or cable service that suits them.
Simply lay down a few ground rules to condo residents: No externally mounted dishes, No new visible cabling in communal areas, etc.
The condo assoc, may be willing to assist in installing ducting - this way, residents can chose fiber, cable, DSL, etc., and it can all go through existing ducting which only needs to be paid for once and won't require new building work when new technology X comes along in 5 years time). In fact, probably the most sensible thing to for a CA to do would be to install some cable ducts running from the basement cable entry point along corridors to individual apartments. That way when a resident wants new cabling installed, all the contractor has to do is install the cable into the ducts and it's job done. FTTP providers may even wish to fill up your ducts with sub-ducts. This is the maximum level of involvement that I would suggest. By having the CA do the duct work, you keep control of quality of workmanship. A particular problem with high-rise blocks is fire codes. Often, they require any hole in an individual apartment to be fully firestopped. This is not a job you should trust to individual network operators, and their low-cost installers. Make a decision to install building wide ducting, and get it properly installed, firestopped and certified.
Running an ISP is a difficult business, both on technical and customer service grounds. The network design is difficult and needs to be done by an expert. Further, how much time are you budgeting for fielding technical support queries, billing, DMCA requests, etc. If you get a DMCA request, which identifies your IP (or one of your IPs), how are you going to forward it to the alleged offender (You've got DHCP server logs, haven't you?) . If you can't forward it, because you don't know, will you face criminal penalties yourself? You might not now, but laws change (in the UK, if you resell an internet service, and a criminal act is committed via it, and you don't keep information allowing you to link an identifiable person with the particular communication, YOU are personally liable).
Similarly, if running a communal ISP, how do the costs work if residents choose not to participate? HSPA+ and LTE dongles are on the market and, where I live, they are killing wired internet and WiFi. I now know many people whose only internet access is a smartphone/tablet with 3G - and that's all they use at home.
Yes, you may be able to get a better service for less money if all 80 residents participate. But what if only 40 participate? What happens when you start getting into legal problems (whether legitimate or not)?
Even with wireless APs, you will still probably need a wired DAS (Distributed Antenna System). This is especially common for cell carriers, but works for Wifi as well, especially in steel-framed buildings. Many buildings already have these paid for by the carriers and also carry public safety, so you may have conduit already available. There are software packages out there to help with this design, but you really need to hire someone.
Trust me. I was on our HOA Board a few years ago and we were talking about provisioning a wireless LAN for our 112 townhomes. The costs were going to be more or less astronomical, and completely uncompetitive with Verizon's $40 20/20 service.
No ISP would provision us cheap bandwidth to share. After all, they make more money selling 112 $40 20/20 accounts.
Oh, and we also got sued, because in my state an HOA was considered a political subdivision, and the Constitution prohibits government from competing with private enterprise. Verizon and Xfinity both sued us, and cost us $15K in legal fees. Now we have annual court-ordered auditing, that we have to pay for (about $5K/year) to have our property inspected to make sure we aren't providing internet service to the units.
I am part of a much smaller association, but some people always bring up those ideas that sound great, but in reality just don't work. I am sure you could design something simple enough and subcontract the install, or just pay a company to do the whole soup to nuts install. The issue is ongoing support and troubleshooting. What if something breaks? Or what if people THINK something is broken? That hourly rate adds up fast. Someone is bound to start complaining their access is "slow". Someone is bound to set up some sort inappropriate server/service. A virus is bound to spread some malware and steal some identities. "Shared" community resources always lead to disputes. I wouldn't want my association touching this at ALL. Most people bundle services like TV, internet, and voice. The only way I would consider it is if a local telco / cable provider came in and offered to provide the backbone, service, and support. I assume all the units are already wired for cable/phone.
But how do they tell the difference between a true expert and someone blowing smoke? There are a lot of charlatans out there who either don't know what they're talking about, or worse know what they're talking about but will recommend overspec'ing, underspec'ing, or a specific vendor becaus it maximizes the consultants payoff. The boad needs to be a check on this. Which means a responsible board person nees to do some research.
Well exactly how does the question posted help here? It's too vague for anyone to offer meaningful advice.
Let's say a heroic Slash user, in response to the board member's vague spec, suggests they go with x solution. The expert hired says that x won't work because of y. What does our intrepid board member do now? It seems that the expert and the Internet man are in disagreement, which is hardly fucking surprising given the vagueness of the project. My suggestion? Go to a contractor and tell them you want to buy internets for your condo.
JC
I have a friend in this exact business. He works with apartment complexes, neighborhoods and business parks to get them wired. Often, he includes a PBX in the solution too.
Before I got the details of his services, I thought I could get a few business class cable lines, merge the bandwidth using a tiny Linux server and setup a community email, web, portal for $200/month that would make 50 units happy. I know that isn't possible anymore. People want netflix, they want hulu, work VPN access and other large bandwidth streaming services.
Still, even at $1000/month, that is cheap compared to 50 units paying Comcast $40/month each. The bandwidth would be the issue - that and piracy policing. VPNs can be a hassle too as more people need to work from home.
Find someone that knows this stuff and has local references. It won't be cheap, but it will still be less than half the cost for everyone paying for their own service from the broadband providers.
Whatever happens, be certain they clone the installed and configured HDD, use RAID and do remote backups so any failure is quickly addressed before you notice it.
I own an apartment building with 31 units. When I bought the place, it was a disaster. Coax cables nailed to the walls of the hallways and apartments, dish network units on the side of the building, etc. Was horrible. I just finished a rehab of it, and here is what I did:
Basement tech cage. In the basement we have a 10x10 tech room. FIOS, RCN and ComCast all run in to the system (Dish will be installing a building-wide system to feed into this as well, but thats been a cluster f**k), each having their own apartment building box in the cage. From that, we have a building distribution system. From the basement tech cage, we have 6 eathernet, 4 coax and 2 fibers going up to each units utility closet.
The blue eathernet is for telephone service. Pair 1 is for the building-wide pbx system (911, front door, etc). Pairs 2-4 are for resident phone services from any of the authorized providers.
The red internet is the buildings network, and that supports the heating system controls, hallway cameras, fire alarm, etc.
The Yellow cable is for the VLAN return (see building wide wifi)
The green, orange and pink cables are for resident services, again from any of our providers.
The two fiber cables are currently unused, but were not that much to put in, and does a bit to future proof us.
The Blue Coax is the residents cable TV service.
The Red Coax is the buildings CCTV system as well as broadcast HDTV (we get sucky local reception, so we improved it by pulling the channels centrally and distributing them on our own CATV system).
Green and yellow coax are spares/future use.
All of that runs to a utility closet in each unit. That closet has the units water shut-offs, HVAC control box, electrical panel, and is where we home-run all of the units coax and eathernet. We provide each unit with a 16 port switch, a dumb phone wiring unit (looks like a switch, supports 4 lines and 8 extensions as dumb phones), and a coax distribution box - all mounted on a small rack, with space and plugs to put NAS drives, Ooma boxes and the like.
We do offer residents email addresses on our domain, and we do provide free internet to the 2 low-income units.
As for Wifi, what we did was install a building-wide wifi network, and set it up so that residents had to register the MAC address of their equipment on a website. We use VLANS to isolate the users and send them back to their apartment networks. Unregistered equipment is on our open wifi network, which is port and url limited (no youtube/hulu/etc, and only port 80)
Once a year, we collect rate information from the 3 providers and send it out to all residents. We have room in our cage for 1-2 additional providers if need be.
Works really well for us, keeps most of the equipment out of the residences, the locked cage, along with the room setup and CLEAR labeling of what is owned by the building (not to mention a contract with each cable co about having to pay for damage to our system) keeps the cable people from hacking at things, and everything operates well (at least, no problems in the last 4 months since the new system went on-line)
Hope this is helpful.
If you do choose to continue on and provide this service here's a product that might work for your distribution layer.
http://www.salira.com/english/OLT3540.aspx
This product can handle 64 ONUs(Fiber modems) per PON port, and it has 2. Each apartment gets a $250 ONU with 2 ethernet interfaces.
http://www.salira.com/english/ONU3350-S.aspx
There are other GePON manufactures of course, but this is the one I have experiance with.
While the majority of comments so far seem to presume the condo association wants to run their own ISP, there is no reason in most of the United States that they have to do so.
Just like your condo association should be able to get "bulk cable", satellite, or Uverse/FIOS/IPTV service, you can purchase bulk Internet in a similar manner. You can even combined bulk TV, Internet, and/or phone service if you want. Even satellite companies have partners who can take care of Internet service nowadays, or can use Ethernet themselves to distribute TV service to the building.
This offloads all the DMCA, etc. work to the service provider, although there are a few catches. The first is that you are paying for service to all units; if a unit owner does not pay their dues, state laws may prohibit you from cutting off service (and even if you could your contract still might require you to pay for it). The second is that most providers currently hooked to your building presume not everyone in your building is using their service; you will need to make sure they provide you enough bandwidth to cover the increased subscription rate.
The third item is that these tend to be long-term contracts; the longer you commit to, the better the potential discount tends to be. However these contracts also include clauses allowing automatic increases in rates.
I looked into this once for a condo association myself; and while a local survey suggested owners wanted such bulk contracts, when confronted with the financial costs (and our rate of non-payment) they tended not to.
I think you may be in the range needed to allow for your setup to have its own switch/noc/head end. as far as the individual units i would say prewire the units for your ISP and then as units are filled drop in the "modem".
You may want to see if the ISP is willing to cut you a deal for some ad space/bulk discount.
whatever you do make sure the walls are built with conduits to allow you to snake wires (and check them every once in a while for the odd dead body).
Also whatever you do Cheaping Out could earn you a condo at the bottom of Michigan lake so keep that in mind.
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It may seem intuitive that doing something like this has advantages, but it really doesn't. This is particularly true for an existing building. retrofitting the level of infrastructure necessary to provide decent service, and the subsequent support of that service, would put the per/user fee so high that you won't be able to compete with per-user costs from a regular DSL or cable-based service provider. Also, keep in mind thwt if you are the resident tech-head, you are probably going to be the one that gets called when things go wrong (even if you think it has been outsourced).
I tried it with my own condo association - we concluded that we would just continue to allow residents to order service from the various service providers.
I live in a complex that told comcast and their 50mb service to leave, and instead forces me to pay $50 a month for 3mb service that is so oversubscribed packet loss never drops below %50 and average RTT of any pings are in excess of 4000 milliseconds. The association though it was a great idea because they could take a cut of all the fees. But what they didn't realize is the huge cost of provisioning bandwidth, the massive investment in anti torrent devices, and all types of equipment to make sure a couple people don't do to the building wide internet what has been done. Because of that they refuse to upgrade the pipe, and renters are leaving in droves, New residents leave after two months because of the internet situation. The cost in money to the complex from lost rent is so great that they are now begging comcast to come back and footing the entire bill to repair the damage to Comcasts infrastructure that Direcpath caused as a means to keep Comcast out.
I seriously encourage anyone who is thinking about limiting the choice of their residents and forcing lock-in to ***Google Direcpath*** and let that be a lesson to everyone. Its bad enough living in a complex I cannot put up my own dish. The last thing I need is a complex limiting my choices for internet which is the most vital utility besides electricity. Living in this place over the last year has been a nightmare and I will be leaving as soon as my lease is up. This has finally soured me on apartment living to the point I will only be renting single family dwellings from now on regardless of the increased price in doing so. I will consider this insurance against someone taking away my internet access.
Call the local ISP (start with cable and ilec) and explain the situation, and discuss options. Remember you cant just buy a single cable modem and run ethernet to 80 different customers, that's illegal.
the cable cos use that as well as dish / directv for there multi room dvr boxes.
http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/content/mdu/owners/installation?topnavtype=2
You won't be able to prevent residents from putting up their own WiFi or for that matter any other device that uses the same frequencies. You might try to use covenants but you'll probably lose in court.
I echo others' comments: Make it easy on ISPs to provide service.
If you can do so easily, run fiber or for that matter fiber, copper, and cable-tv coax from every unit to a central location. If you can't do it easily, then at least provide for future digging by ISPs as they install infrastructure to customers on an on-demand basis.
Then let the unit owners contract with their ISP of choice and stay out of it.
One more thing you can do as an association: Avoid doing things that interfere with present and future regulated wireless services. For example, if down the road you are considering installing solar panels on the roof, make sure they won't interfere with wireless communications.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We are in the middle of replacing this for two condo associations. One is a 450 unit residential building and the other is a 250 unit office building. We do this professionally and the biggest headaches are below:
1) Who is the incumbent carrier (if any) and can they be thrown out. In some states you can renegotiate all contracts when the building goes from "developer owned" to "association owned."
2) Copper is significantly cheaper to install and far easier to maintain than fiber.
3) If you aren't doing cable TV then you're in a far easier place.
4) You will need an IDF on each floor or each other floor depending on the wiring runs.
5) You will also need switching equipment.
6) Hire a real company to pull the wiring. We had some jackwagons who were in there before who had pulled wiring without putting it in conduits through the firewalls in the electrical rooms. They also didnt suspend it from the ceiling properly. We had to then rerun all of the wiring to bring it into code.
7) Your electrical rooms are most likely the ones with the Telco equipment in it and are the only place to most likely run the wiring. Make sure they have HVAC vents into them as transformers generate a lot of heat and ruin equipment.
8) If there is no spare conduits going up and down then you really want to reconsider the whole thing. Core drilling sucks as its expensive and also requires a separate permit and inspection.
But mainly ask yourself, do you want to be an ISP?
Isn't this as simple as running fiber to every unit?
What do you mean? Do residents not have internet access at all? In our condo, we have a choice between Comcast and Verizon for TV, phone, internet. So perhaps you're in a very old condo that doesn't even have cable?
Or do you mean you want to add Wi-Fi for all?
Don't tackle a problem larger than it has to be.
Service plans collectively brought by the housing company or association are a profitable business for the providers, and often include cable and other services as a bundle. See the length of contracts, verify the company's right to make this kind of decision for the occupants and make sure your infrastructure is in order as otherwise you might want to install new cabling. One of the contracts is made with the provider, the occupants might need an additional contract for the service. You should get other infrastructure to the premises free of charge, but the equipment is likely still owned by the service provider. See your responsibilities for security and insurance.
Cat3, that is the phone cable which you already have, is good for 100Mbps for the short distances, depending of the technology. Cable goes further. Cat5 cabling makes selecting providers easier, but watch out for installation contractors with insufficient skills if selecting Cat6, which is unnecessary for a while anyway. Fiber is relatively expensive if you want to go for a post construction install.
80 units contract for 1-10 Mbps should come quite cheaply if you have any competition in the area. If you are located in a relatively busy neighborhood I'd look prices where the occupants pay for 1/3 the price of the similar offerings brought individually and the condo association pays few hundred a month. That might require an additional cable contract bundle.
This all is purely anecdotal, of course, and surely do not apply in Chicago.
We started with some cheesy radio links and have moved up in speed over the years to where we now have a direct fiber connection to a local ISP. We are currently buying 50MB symmetrical service for data, and that is sufficient to allow widespread streaming of Netflix for our residents (we don't have access to cable TV here, but a few folks have satellite). We added VOIP phone service a few years back, which the same ISP sells us over a separate set of fibers to avoid call quality issues. We have local servers for email, community website stuff and for the VOIP service (using the excellent SIPx open source software). We use open source PFSense software running on a low-power ALIX box as our central firewall & DHCP server.
We charge $30 for Internet and $30 for phone, with unlimited domestic long distance, which includes a small margin that allows us to accumulate funds for maintenance and improvements. These prices are considerably lower than people here would pay for equivalent services, and people are pretty happy with the quality. The system is maintained by a small team of volunteer geeks, and our residents understand that we won't necessarily jump out of bed to fix a problem--we'll do the best we can, but don't guarantee 100% service levels. We don't enforce any bandwidth caps per-household, and that has not been a problem.
This kind of thing is entirely feasible, as long as you have a core group of geeks that consider it something they are interested in putting some time into. We have saved our residents many tens of thousands of dollars over the years, keeping that money circulating in our local community instead of shipping it off to some corporate behemoth. And for those of us who do the work, we generally find it an engaging and enjoyable use of our time, and find it satisfying to provide a useful service to our neighbors.
Oh, and I concur with an earlier poster--if you do it, do it wired. Provide one jack to each condo, and let the owners distribute around their rooms as they see fit. You might provide some wireless access in common spaces.
In order to answer your question properly, you need to define the aims of providing this internet facility.
Are the residents currently restricted in terms of what internet service they can acquire?
Why would tradtional wired internet connections, which are made individually to apartments by the telcos, be inadequate or unsuitable - how does the proposed system improve upon them?
What is the benefit of installing your own system rather than having telcos install connections into the building for those who require them?
How will it be financed?
Will it be a source of income?
What do residents require and expect in terms of internet access?
I contacted an ISP that does provisioning and IP phones and such to provision an 18 unit office complex under construction. We are paying for the inside installs and wiring and they are provisioning the drop and the router cabinets. The recurring cost is under $2k and that includes internet, IP phone, add-subtract users as needed. That sounds like what you could use locally.
I have live in more than one condo/home owners association and my experience is that the association is not an efficient way to manage things. It is necessary for common property (roof, boilers, plumbing, brickwork, entryways, stairs, etc.) but if you don't need something to be common property don't make it common property. I have never been a member of an association that had participation of 50% or more of the unit owners. If it weren't for proxies, nothing would get done. On top of that, the members that complain the most about common elements are often the ones that don't show up to association meetings and don't help maintaining the common elements.
You are becoming an ISP, so be ready for emails, phone calls, etc. from the other members when they web browser does not work, a site is down, they got a virus, or any other Internet issue even though it has nothing to do with the condo's LAN. My wife is a property manager and she gets calls from clients when the electricity goes out, even though each unit has its own meter and separate electrical service.
Most condo owners (especially in a high-rise) view the condo as an apartment that they own and the association/management company as the land lords and if there is any problem that is not within their walls its not their problem and the association/management company needs to fix it. What they forget is that they ARE the association and should take some amount of ownership in the common property, that they partly own.
While I'm sure all technical hurdles might eventually be overcome (at some cost) the primary reason for NOT doing this is:
You are putting your condo association into legal jeopardy and this is something the Board should never allow to happen. While you may think that your residents are all good people, you are exposing the association to legal actions if any residents are found to have themself used that internet connection to commit or conspire to commit a crime.
It is possible that in the end your Association will prevail in court and not have to pay damages (in this day and age that may be a very slim chance). Regardless, you will be saddled with potentially very large legal bills to defend the Association.
This is a liability the Association does not need to undertake. Internet, phone, tv are all available directly to the residents at varied price points. This is not the same as maintaining roads, parking lots, etc for the common use of the residents.
And one last reason not to do this - even if you say 'you must call the company to report problems' the residents will still call and complain to the Board and management agent anyway.
Please, run, not walk, away from this idea. FYI, I was president of a large HOA for three years so speak from some personal experience.
While everyone else fights, here's something from my personal experience.
Condo, 37 stories, 450ish units.
For the individual units, a resident / owner has the two options for internet connectivity:
Local cable monopoly
Local phone service provider
The cable option has higher speed but data caps. The phone service provider has run FTTP and uses VHDSL to get to each unit. This limits speed (anything over 10 mb/s is unstable due to the old POTS wiring) but has no data cap.
The building recently (within 6 mos) installed an open wireless connection on the terrace level. This is the floor that has a meeting room, gym and pool. The connection is usable for all three mentioned areas. It is open and unprotected.
The condo board talked not only with legal counsel but with other condo associations in the area to see what they were doing and what legal problems they had encountered.
Nutshell:
Individual units responsible for their own connectivity. An open connection provided in one of the common areas for resident's use.
Maintaining the infrastructure of an ISP is challenging over the long term, especially in an environment where your "expert" may sell her/his unit and leave. So you don't want to own any servers. However, it's a damn good idea to wire every unit to a common DMZ/patch bay in a secured space. I'd recommend running some sort of combo cable up to each unit (Cat 5, multimode fiber and RG6), something like this: http://www.smarthome.com/868241J/2-Cat-5e-2-RG6-Quad-Cable-Jacket-500-Feet-RG6-Coax-Cable/p.aspx Each subscriber can then decide how they want to access the Internet, and what they way to pay, and you don't get somebody knocking holes in your walls trying to run cable. You could even designate one of the Cat5 drops as a common net that you put cameras on, if you need to.
Drop in a full size 2 post rack, add in a few shelves (one for each ISP), and make power available. Done.
Most of the people who want Internet service probably already have it.
I agree that a majority of HOA internet plans can be a pain. But if it is done right it can be great. I once lived in an apartment that offered 10 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up with static IP's and cable TV for $30 a month. I loved it.
The apartment that I just moved into is wired for cable, with hookups for Comcast and AT&T. Just wire your condos for cable and phone according to the recommendations of your local cable and phone companies; and then have your tenants get cable modems or DSL. The best way to get good service is to ensure that your residents can easily choose among 2-3 competing ISPs, and let the ISPs deal with the headaches.
No, I will not work for your startup
As IT folks, we often think we know what uses want, so should want. The first thing you should do is ask the residents what they want, instead of assuming you already know. Wired or wireless? How fast? Etc.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
The challenge here is to provide some level of service to the tenants in your complex. The reasoning behind this service is presumably to provide value to the tenants above what they could receive from the local telephone or cable company. Therefore, you should start with a cost estimate from anyone who will service your building. If you encounter a company that will offer ethernet-over-copper, fiber based, or fixed wireless service to your building, then you might have a chance. Because Internet bandwidth needs are rising, you should estimate bandwidth needs of at least 10 Mbps per unit, to handle prime-time video streaming and whatever else people come up with. For 80 units, you should be looking at no less than 100 Mbps central service.
Secondly, you will need a way to ensure that no single connection uses more than their fair share of the bandwidth, during peak periods. This will involve some bandwidth limiting equipment (or open source software, if you can get away with it).
I have seen a successful implementation in San Francisco that provided ethernet to each unit, but a separate company handled the billing. This might be an excellent option for your tenants. I suggest that you provide cat5e ethernet cabling to each unit from a central location, which would allow you to upgrade to gigabit in the future. In addition, you could provide WiFi access points on each floor. It might be tricky to place those WiFi access points in areas that will allow full coverage of each floor. You would be best off to hire a network engineer to assist with the project.
To set this up, install it, buy all of the necessary equipment, and hire the people to maintain it you're going to spend a considerable amount effort and money for a net gain of absolutely zero value over the current system. Unless you can get a phenomenal deal on a guaranteed Gbps+ line (which is highly unlikely), and your tenants unanimously prefer WAP and ethernet direct connections over their own choice, just let the local ISPs handle it. There's just no real plus side here. Unless you're wiring fiber connections to each condo from a backbone with the hardware capable of handling that now and moving forward (not cheap), your solution won't scale as well as coax to each room and will come with the added cost of needing equipment to terminate the fiber in each condo, which is also not commonplace (read: cheap) in consumer networking equipment yet (last I checked). You can implement something that will work with today's speeds but in 10-20 years, you'll have to retrofit the entire building to handle then-modern speeds, and that's just a massive red number you don't ever want to see.
www.kkworx.com
They are highly skilled in all the areas you are looking for - They can help with circuits, firewalls, layer 1 infrastructure etc.
Wires are so last century old skool. Let the tenants use cellphone modems.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
My old condo building (in Seattle) originally had building-wide internet service provided by Comcast. It was unreliable and badly underprovisioned - so many people were constantly streaming video and downloading via BitTorrent that people trying to use it for work complained that their VPN connections were constantly timing out.
We reviewed the options for upgrading the service, but there simply wasn't anything available in the Seattle market that was remotely cost effective. The options also would have locked the building in some pretty painful long-term contracts.
We ended up canceling the service entirely. Residents prefer to choose Internet service that works for their needs, and it's a lot cheaper for the building, too. Speaking from experience, I would recommend strongly against offering Internet access as a residential building service.
First, Whatever you do make sure residents have the option to not use your service and contract directly - e.g. DSL, Cable. This will let them decide between your service and other services that are available.
Second, contract for a high speed Fibre connection to the building, probably an OC-16, with a full SLA and 1:1 download/upload ratio. Have it come to a central office, and then dispence 1Gb/10Gb ethernet to each unit, to a central office in the unit itself. Each unit should be in its own subnet.
Third, wire each unit so that there are ethernet jacks in each room that connects back to the central office in the unit. Provide a phone line that suports DLS, and a cable connection to the same central office so that residents can make use of the ethernet in the unit even if they don't use your service.
Fourth, offer a wireless router with support for their unit at a nominal cost if they want it. Otherwise, they can maintain it themselves.
If you have a common area, provide some connectivity for residents - e.g. so kids can do lan parties, or people could have a small get together. Perhaps provide some support so they can access their unit network (e.g. to retrieve files) easily.
If you do it right, and price it right, then your residents will want to use your services instead of DSL or Cable and the expenditures will repay themselves quite well.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
For networking pre-existing structures such as hotels and condos, you can usually make do with VDSL2. It runs over regular cat 3 phone lines, and can provide speeds of 100+ Mbps up to 500 meters. You simply buy a DSLAM, install it in the building's phone room (where all the lines from the phone company get split up into the individual condo units). From that point it's just like DSL from your phone company (using VDSL2 modems instead of ADSL modems), except you have to provide the Internet service which plugs into the DSLAM.
You do have to wire up all 80 units' phone lines into the DSLAM, but that's a lot less work than running new cat5 or fiber cable to 80 condo units. The hard part is that you're effectively the building's ISP now. You have to negotiate for a dedicated line, maintain the contract and equipment, set up packet-shaping and bandwidth sharing rules, configure the LAN so users can't (or can) see each other, troubleshoot problems when they arise, etc. So you'll need someone on staff who can handle these problems. But for the most part once it's set up it'll continue to run on its own. I'd say it's the optimal solution for networking a hotel, and probably optimal for condos if you're willing to deal with the support.
Uh, were you in the US? How did you set it up that you had any legal liability?
If they can sue the HOA, and the HOA is merely acting as an ISP, then they can sue the upstream ISP too, right? Except they can't because both are shielded as a common carrier.
If you didn't set yourself up as an ISP, well...
Most likely you want this to be a wireless soultion. Unless your units are setup in a way there is one good uniformed place to put a jack in evey unit. Otherwize your in for wireing nightmare and schudleing nightmares to get acess to units.
I whould say .5 mpbs per unit is what you want to ask for that should keep primetme issues to a minimium.
Make sure the put enough Ap's so there no more then 4 -5 units per Ap or you will cause bottle necks there.
Make sure you get a good SLA writtten in blood from provider with key time frames for total and partial system outages and total downntime per year. With stiff penitilies for non compliance. Also make sure they provide the board with a full network map and passwords to any routers and Aps in case theyngo belly up a new team can come in and take ove gear with a minium of drama.
Sure... pay my bills.
Cause I already went to school and obviously know how to do your
job better cause you're here asking me how to do it.
You = Newb,
Me = Expert.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
That's because people who know what they are doing have better ways to spend their time than being on committees.
Bonus points for using committee as a verb.
Do your research on CALEA and the impact of you becoming a provider to people.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
As so many work ethic challenged slashdotters have pointed out, taking on the role of an ISP may not be cost effective for an 80 unit condo. It seems there are a couple avenues the condo association could pursue, so develop them and put it to a vote. If the people who live in the condo have ample disposable income and want a high quality of service, the 'wire your building and let an ISP handle the rest' route is probably best. I agree with others, that you can get an ISP to wire it for you all at once at minimal or no cost, though that locks you in with them. So, is the cost of having cat5 installed by your own contractor to every unit worth the benefit of having choice between 2 or 3 consumer ISP's that can compete in the basement? Probably not, since consumer ISP's are pretty similar anyway and you'll have the upkeep of the cat5 cable plant. Anytime trouble arises, the ISP's first answer will be "it's your building wiring". It saddens me to arrive at the conclusion that a monopoly is your best solution.
If, however, your condo assoc consists of gamers and tech geeks with little disposable income and lots of free time and expertise on their hands (in an alternate reality somewhere), I say install a router (not a firewall, not a NAT router, a real router) and used dslam and get bids on a ~100Mbps dedicated connection with a sufficient IP block to assign public addresses to one device per unit. I'm guessing the building was prewired for telephone and those lines belong to the building. You can run a couple 24 or 48 port DSLAM's on ADSL2+ at 25Mbps or VDSL2 at 100Mbps, publish a list of compatible modems that are the responsibility of each tenant, and probably come out under $100 per condo for network infrastructure and modem. If you spend $1000/mo on a nice fast circuit that comes to $12.50/mo per subscriber. After that, maybe throw in a couple HDHomeRun Pro's with multicast to stream the over-the-air broadcast TV channels. In that community, hard-line POTS service isn't needed. People can use a SIP service on their own if they need more than cell phone service. That's my kind of internet connection, the poor-man's AT&T U-Verse.
Props to some dudes on a US Military base in Iraq who worked this out years ago to share an expensive VSAT connection and presented it on google tech talks.....I just can't find that video anymore.
From a network engineering standpoint this is how I would set up your internal network for the condos. Using the 10.0.0.0 private address block - 10.floor.unit.1-254 for each condo unit. If you are using managed switches and your own router - set each port on it's own vlan - if possible - this allows blocking off each tenant's unit from the others, which prevents DHCP clashes, virus spread, hacking etc... Set up the router with sub interfaces for each of the condo units and a simple acl blocking any 10.0.0.0 from incoming to each of the vlans. This allows access from the internet only, not from other tenants, unless they route back through the internet. Your router should support NAT as well for address translation.
One word: Don't.
Let a private provider offer the service, and have each person have their own individual billing account with the provider - then it is their problem and not yours. Otherwise you are stuck with doing tech support, billing, chasing after people that don't pay and dealing with all the typical thankless customer service BS. Plus your fellow condo mates will probably want you to do all of this coordination for free, and assume your time is worth nothing.
When I was in university, I lived in a lodging house with 10 other students. I ran a communal network with one internet feed, a private network, and collecting money from people for "their share". Never again. A complete pain-in-the-ass thankless job, which was definitely not worth the time/aggravation.
My company offered such a service for almost 10 years in Chicago before we sold it to AM3INC.COM. I do recommend calling them. They will cut to the chase with their best offer. Tell them the President of onShore Networks sent you. Here's how it works and why I recommend not doing it yourself like so many people suggest. Distribution There are many ways to distribute internally, Ethernet (copper or fiber), xDSL, MoCA, DOCSIS (cablemodem), Wifi, and more (not worth mentioning). If you've got clean runs or are doing some sort of cabling or construction work then it's worth pulling cat5/6 cable (with fiber links between distant closets) and doing it right. The provider you hire will cover most if not all the capital costs. Obviously your building is already built so you're almost definitely best off with a DSL variant as it can use existing copper pairs (phone line wire). I suggest ADSL2+ which is under $100/unit in hardware cost (DSLAM concentrators and ADSL2+ modems). ADSL2+ does 24Mb/1.5Mb speeds which is really fine for pretty much all applications. VDSL2 is faster (100Mb/100Mb) but double the cost last I checked. Ethernet is even cheaper and faster but cabling costs will be $200 to $1000 per unit (depends on ease of paths). Wifi is a damn cool thing and fast enough for pretty much all Internet applications but it really is a mess to get it to work well in a dense and large setting. Throw in that people have their own APs and you get all sorts of radio noise screaming at each other. Some days it's awesome and other days it sucks. It is the cheapest to install and I've seen decent setups, especially if speeds are throttled a bit but as a provider it's not worth the trouble. Remember that support calls are your biggest cost. More on that... Regardless of the inside distribution, you provider would work all this out for you and mange the equipment. You want them to own and manage the equipment because you do not want to wrestle with the condo association to handle repairs, upgrades, service work when they take forever to make decisions on spending money. You also do not want to have to handle support calls. ISPs cannot avoid effective PC support for end users. These guys are available 24/7 including dispatch. They handle inside wiring, equipment, security, any bandwidth management, end user support, upstream connections, etc.. I strongly recommend buying what's called a bulk service. This means one flat fee covers the entire building. I understand why everybody commenting hates that but I lit 63 residential buildings (still have commercial ones) in Chicago and more than half were bulk. At first users don't like the idea but when they realize they get giant speeds, much higher reliability, real support, and all for 1/2 the price of anything the idiots at Comcast offer, they're sold. We typically had 95% of the units in a building using the building's bulk service within a year. They knew they were paying for it and switched and were pleased. Techie users loved getting real static IPs, even subnets, cacti (MRTG) graphs, ACLs on the switches (security), more. Plus there are bonuses that the big ISPs won't touch such as Wifi in public areas (parking lot, laundry, rec room, office), TVs in the rec room, included Internet for the office, webcams in various places. Again if you don't do bulk, you can't really get all this stuff because the provider can't be sure you're not sharing the service with others that aren't paying. You should also consider AM3 for TV service. The same sort of rules apply. They sell DirecTV and bulk is the way to go for pretty much the same reasons I give for Internet. Actually they offer bargain VOIP too. Bulk doesn't really make sense for VOIP mainly because it's super cheap anyway but also because so many people just have cell but you can do it. Internet Connections In Chicago you have a few options but today the obvious choice is fiber. Faster is better but you pay for it and it's not as cheap as in some places. Just see what providers offer you. Honestly you'll probably be happy with 50Mbps spee
Original poster here:
To those who were offended for not asking properly. I asked here because it was the first place I look in such situations and nothing was posted so I thought I'd get a discussion going. Seems like there was some interest and knowledge to be shared. Though not "competent," I can assure you I am the most knowledgeable person on the committee and most likely in the association.
Some more specifics about our building:
Currently only have access to ATT DSL but it's terrible because our telephone wires are bad (dropouts and throttling bw is the norm). We also have Direct TV which is bad and unreliable. I believe this was a previous whole building exclusive contract (so I understand the downsides of these).
To those saying keep your hands off of my HOA fees...I understand as I just bought and spent a lot of time thinking about these and have a good idea of what they do to property values in the mind of a buyer (ours are high as it's an old building, with an engineer and doorman, but I felt the price was low enough to compensate). Every condo for themselves is a fine model so long as the wires work (see above). However given that ISPs typically oversubscribe individual users there may be significant savings to be had by going together.
Some upgrade should be done to our internet infrastructure (it may or may not actually get done in the near term). I was hoping that folks might have opinions on good ISP's for this sort of situation, especially in the chicagoland area. I wonder what are the appropriate questions to ask of an ISP? In particular how much BW should be allocated to the building (regardless of how it's billed it still needs to be there)? What are the pluses/minuses of different technologies (fiber, metroethernet, point-to-point wireless)?
Thanks again for all of the helpful comments.
You need to start somewhere, so start with your local telephone company. A building of that size probably has a room with telco equipment. It would not take much for them to provide DSL to each unit in the building from that point. That leaves an estimate of WAN bandwidth, which they happen to be good at doing. The disadvantage of this is that most people will need to have filters on their telephone lines. Depending upon ownership of the condo itself, the filters might be installed by the condo association or might be installed by the condo owner (there are dongles that attach to an existing wall jack and there are replacements for the existing wall jack). In any case, the local telco would be a good starting point.
Two things here that you do not understand. First, it matters not whether the litigant ultimately wins. You (the association) are going to be stuck with legal bills regardless. Second, to get the "protection" against ultimate damages as you describe then the association must in fact set itself up as an ISP, not just 'act' like one. That is kind of like saying that the owner of a home who pays for internet which is then shared by others in the house (teens, wife, husband, adult children) could never be named in a suit as well, gee they were just acting as an ISP to the other household members.
There is really nothing to be gained by doing this and is certainly not justified by the samll amount of money each member might save over a go it alone. As an aside, I have a vaction condo where the association has arranged a group discount but each member is individually billed for cable TV That would be a far better objective.
I lived in a very large Chicago high-rise with an HOA. They decided to go with the fractional fiber-optic approach with a small provider/reseller/whatever. I'd have to say, the service was incredible. Haven't had anything like it before or since. The best part was that the tech support didn't skip a beat when he asked me about my OS and I said "Ubuntu." Then again, this was the same building that told me I couldn't have orange drapes in my 15th floor unit. Whatever...
Want WiFi?
Check out UniFi
Affordable. Effective. I use it in schools. Use lots of APs and low power at each.
Since most others are telling you why this is a bad idea, etc...I'll try to actually provide a useful answer.
In a situation like you describe where the condo likely owns it's own wire plant, DSL is probably a pretty good solution. WiFi is going to be problematic and expensive because you have to worry about interference, installing, securing and maintaining APs, etc. Ethernet is also going to be crazy expensive to install.
Assuming you have one or two centralized wiring closets where all of the telco wiring comes in to the building, you could install your own DSLAM there and sell or lease DSL modems to your owners/tenants. The DSL signal would go from the DSLAM in the wiring closet, over the existing phone wiring to the individual units where the subscribers would connect their modems. While DSL is normally pretty slow compared to cable, this is usually because you have to deal with distance limitations, but in a situation like this you shouldn't have any runs over a 400-500 feet which would put them well within the max speed distance. 80 units over 20 stories means 4 units per story, so there shouldn't be too much horizontal wiring, and figuring about 10-12' of height per story we come up with a max vertical distance of around 250 feet.
Versatek is one company that makes equipment designed for this purpose that I found with a quick Google search. They have DSLAMs that they claim can deliver 24 Mbps per subscriber, which isn't the fastest service, but it's well above the national average.
Doing some quick math...
80 units times average normal broadband speed of 10Mbps = 800 Mbps
Figure maybe 10% actual average utilization (assuming you don't have anyone that is BT crazy) = 80 Mbps
My guess would be that you would probably have plenty of bandwidth at 80 Mbps, but you could start there and scale up/down as needed.
The real issues I see are:
1) Who is going to support this when a subscriber has a problem at 9PM on a Friday night?
2) You'll need some technical expertise to install and provision the service, which increases costs and reduces the savings associated with your economy of scale 3) You'll have to pay for commercial service to be able to legally resell it 4) You may also incur additional costs to ensure you have enough IP addresses (don't be a dick and put everyone behind NAT, if you have any techies this will make them mad)
This sounds like a pretty cool project. You can DIY and save some money and pass those savings on to the subscribers, or you can just hire a company to do it all for you, but then you sort of negate the cost savings.