Slashdot Mirror
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?"
... 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.
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 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.
On top of this, you will also need to manage turning access on and off to each unit, collecting monthly/annual revenue from each user, changing rate limiting settings for each user based on the amount they have purchased, dealing with DMCA complaints and any other law enforcement requests since you would be an ISP, blocking spam from being pumped from your network, servicing customer service requests when the service is not working or users don't know how to configure equipment, handling equipment or wiring failures, etc. You would be basically starting your own ISP and your own company without really knowing how to run an ISP (based on the fact you are asking these questions).
Actually installing the wiring and the equipment to run this operation really isn't that bad (as long as you get some professional advice). The trouble is managing the service and maintaining it. Have you tried reaching out to established ISPs to see if they will manage this for you and draw a fat pipe to your building in exchange for something (minimum user guarantee or the primary ISP for the tenants or a required connection as part of condo fees)? I have seen local ISPs draw a line to condo and office buildings and then sell portions of that line and manage the system. I have also seen condo buildings have a dedicated satellite connection (cable tv) and only offer that single satellite provider service to tenants.
On the other hand, a pooling of resources and building-wide network makes sense for many reasons...
Having lots of different individual wireless networks in a small space causes congestion, a single centrally controlled one is far more efficient, and if there are any public areas in the development this could cover those too.
Depending how small the units are, having a central area where users can install noisy devices like a NAS (and not have to listen to it while you sleep) could be useful.
A building wide network has other uses, for instance door access systems, CCTV, access to shared resources such as a satellite dish etc.
There's no reason to have only a single internet connection, several could be used and load balanced while also providing some redundancy - depending on whats available in the area.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The problem with cisco certified people and partners, is that they will push cisco products regardless of wether they are best value for the job... Same for any other vendor cert, all designed to sell products rather than provide a quality service.
For example, I built several networks recently using hp switches because they came in considerably cheaper than cisco, while still providing the required functionality.
I would much rather use a vendor-neutral organisation.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I don't have anything against asking specific, directed questions about a well-documented issue. But the article submitter wants ALL the answers on a cloudy issue that hasn't been detailed.
Analogy: "I have to buy a car for my wife, here's several questions about how the car should be: Headlights? Tires? Engine? Consumption? Color?"
The questions and details are crap, so the answers would be crap too.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
So you're saying that a decent capacity ethernet connected to the internet via redundant pairs of multimode fiber, which is what's installed in all the apartment houses in the area, is as slow as the loop that many cable ISP's use? Wrong...
Let's just put this out there: I opted for the 100Mb/s up and down service(and am currently trying to see if I can justify the cost of the gigabit service). In an area with a bit over 600 apartments, my ISP has 495 customers. Even during prime time, I can use my connection to its fullest, downloading ISO's, updating games, reaching 11.5MB/s practical speed. I can also upload at that speed.
The difference is, here in Sweden, ISP's don't oversubscribe like they do in the US. You could have that in the US too, if more people started working together and negotiating as a group, to counter the abuse from the big ISP's/telcos.