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?"

Comments

No offense, but...

[war4peace]

If you're asking all those questions, you should not be in that committee.

Re:No offense, but...

[Mr0bvious]

I often ask questions that I already have an opinion about (or believed expertise) to either validate my thoughts or to bring in additional insights from others.

Just because he's asked the questions doesn't mean that he is not competent in this area.

Personally, I think *not* asking these types of questions is arrogant and closed minded.

If you think you're an expert that has nothing more to learn, you are a lot less smart than you think - this is just another take on the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Re:No offense, but...

[Sorthum]

Yeah, not trying to be offensive here, but answering the questions you've posed has spun up an entire industry; it's decidedly non-trivial. On the plus side, for a project of this size you can quite easily get a number of consultancies in Chicago to quote you free of charge.

Re:No offense, but...

[w.hamra1987]

we spend years in university, paying thousands of dollars, to study networking and communication, not to sit at home and watch... but to answer those questions for you. hire a network engineer, and he'll be well worth it for you.

Re:No offense, but...

[icebike]

I agree, this sounds like way more trouble than it is worth.

The least you could do (and the object is in fact to do the least possible) is to let a contract for cat5 or fiber to each unit
all terminating in the basement or some such locked place.

Then allow the various ISPs to come in and do the rest of the work on a customer by customer basis.
You don't want these guys running cable all over your building.

ISPs get a numbered patch panel in the basement, and one (or more) direct runs to each apartment.
Space and power for their rack/router.

What goes on inside the apartment is the apartment owner's problem.

You want to protect your building's common areas from legions of independent installers.
But you do not want to get into the ISP business.

Re:No offense, but...

[Zebai]

I recommend this also, do nothing. Making a choice like this for your community forces those who want no part of it to contribute to it as part of their association fees. It would also severely restrict competition as many competitors will not invest in a community with an existing bulk cable/internet arrangements because the number of customers they could acquire would not be enough to warrant construction and maintenance cost. I work for a cable company and we do offer bulk agreements to communities but these type of arrangements restrict choices and is best left to places that would suit it (nursing homes, student housing etc, places that change tenants frequently.)

Re:No offense, but...

[hairyfeet]

Yes but the bigger question is is this an Ask Slashdot question and the answer is no, it is not. Network engineers get paid good money to set up places like this because it IS complex, difficult, and basically a royal PITA, especially in a high rise. This isn't a question like "Here is the jobs I have, what kind of CPU would be best with this budget?" or some such, frankly the answers he is gonna get are gonna be worthless because you need to know the layout, what kind of lines are in the area, what kind of throughput are they expecting, etc.

This just isn't the kind of question you can just throw onto a form with so little details and get anything but total bullshit back, sorry.

Re:No offense, but...

[MMC Monster]

Where's the +6 modifier when you need it?

If you go with one provider to support Internet for the whole building, you're locked in.

Getting each apartment wired and then just letting the ISPs fight it out in the basement closet where the patch cables terminate is much safer.

You do NOT want to run your own severs in the basement.

You MAY want to mandate that individual apartments not have dish antennas sticking out their windows.

Re:No offense, but...

[aaarrrgggh]

Having wondered a similar thing, a little input can go a long way to determine if the project would make sense. If it wouldn't, you won't find vendors that will tell you so for free.

So, I will share what I do know about it:
-If the building owns the telephone cable plant, the cheapest solution is to go to ADSL at the main point of entry for distribution to the units. This will limit capacity, but is easiest to implement. Your handoff between an upstream supplier will likely be Ethernet.
-If you have concrete shear walls between units, don't consider wireless.
-Most importantly, it requires nearly 100% buy-in from the owners all wanting the service you can provide for it to be economically viable. If you can get 100Mbit for $1400/month (recent quote I got elsewhere), your MRC is $17.50 per unit. So, if you amortize over 36 months, you can only spend $7k and keep the monthly cost at $20 without any profit.

There should be full-service companies that will give you triple-play packages, but it is going to be hard to justify on cost.

Hire an expert.

[khasim]

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.

Re:Hire an expert.

[sycodon]

Further, those without it probably don't want it.

Yet this committee is now going to contract to provide it to everyone, jack up the association dues to pay for it and those who didn't want it in the first place are going to take it in the ass.

I hate Condo/Home owner associations.

Re:Hire an expert.

[ShanghaiBill]

I hate Condo/Home owner associations.

You are not alone. If you look in the real estate section of the classifieds, many ads will say "No HOA!" The lack of an HOA is a major selling point. I have never see one that say "Great HOA!"

HOAs are interesting because they are a microcosm of the problems with democracy. Even though they are elected, the majority hate them and don't feel they represent their interests. The people who run for the HOA board tend to be busybodies who want to "solve" everyone else's non-problems. The poster is a good example of that. He is trying to turn the HOA into an ISP middleman, which I doubt a single tenant wants.

Re:Hire an expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

...HOAs are interesting because they are a microcosm of the problems with democracy. Even though they are elected, the majority hate them and don't feel they represent their interests. The people who run for the HOA board tend to be busybodies who want to "solve" everyone else's non-problems. The poster is a good example of that. He is trying to turn the HOA into an ISP middleman, which I doubt a single tenant wants.

That's because, just like in a democracy, no one wants to be bothered with their civic duties. Most don't want to run, most don't bother to even show up for the meetings and vote on issues, most don't even want to hear about anything that doesn't immediately concern them. They would rather complain in shock and outrage any time something goes wrong and invent theories about how others are somehow conspiring against them.

Distribution

[Zan Lynx]

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.

Re:Distribution

[adolf]

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.

Indeed. And at this point, the dollars and cents probably cease to make any sense anymore: Half a gigabit/s of bandwidth, just for one "medium-sized" condo? I'm a decade or two behind on my terminology and pricing for "big pipes," but I'm thinking that 80 people won't want to pay for all that -- especially it they also have to pay for the folks who manage it.

My suggestion: Make sure the building has good wiring, and excellent service availability with whatever established providers that already exist.

Pander to the needs and wants of existing providers. Run coax and twisted pair all over the place, and multimode fiber if that ever seems like a real possibility (and it almost never does). Ask ISPs what it is that they want from you (this takes footwork, phone calls, and meetings) to ensure stellar service in the building..

Resist the temptation to combine spaces and designate wiring closets which are only for communications, and organize them so that they're easy to use without Larry the Cable Guy fucking everything up on accident.

And then, if they want it managed for them, do so: Charge the tenants for access, both per wired port and per wireless access point, since that part is easy to manage. And then allow their own ISP to handle the bandwidth requirements.

Or just modernize. Give them their own wiring closet (it need only be a cubby) where things come together, inside of their own unit, and let the ISP (or the end-user, or both) just deal with it, as they would in any other well-wired dwelling, and write off the cost of the prewire exactly as one would that of the carpet and the blinds.

Keep it simple.

[Karmashock]

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 don't want a condo association middleman

[dougsyo]

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.