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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)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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)
Spend $1000 to hire somebody who'll save you $500 by proposing a cheaper solution.
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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"
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
Why do you assume somebody will fuck up if he isn't an expert in the field?
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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.