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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.
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'll go with the crowd here. As a matter of fact, i work for a company that would fit your profile brilliantly (Cisco Partner and working with Small and Medium Businesses). Too bad we operate in Italy :P
Network Design (more than anything else) and cabling are very very very delicate and complex operations and easy to screw up. Your idea is mighty fine, grouping together will allow you to have a much better bartering ability in working out the service delivered by the ISP. It means, on average, your condo will have better internet than their surrounding buildings (if the Network Engineer you'll hire is good).
A few pointers on who to hire:
1 - Get a company that does ONLY this. No behemoths that do everything. Don't ask the ISP directly (if it does managed services).
2 - Get a company with some, but not too much, history in the field. Meaning a company that has been operating for 4-5 years (less likely to go under *during* your delivery) but not one that has been in the field 20-30 years. You want fresh people with brilliant ideas that can still deliver them.
3 - I'll blow my own trumpet here, but get certified professionals. I'm not saying you should go with a Cisco partner necessarily (you should), but get a company that does networking as their bread and butter. This usually means Cisco or Juniper partners (even at the lowest level, which in Cisco's case is SELECT level).
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is the MRTG for an apartment complex with 1600 apartments (approx 5000 people) and free to use internet for them all: http://bolignet.farummidtpunkt.dk/cgi-bin/mrtg-rrd.cgi/fiber.html
The interesting thing to note is that we are not just maxing out the uplink. There is no traffic shaping, everyone can use whatever they want (bittorrent too!), everyone got gigabit and the uplink is gigabit too.
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.
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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.
You're actually quite good at formatting badly! :)