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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?"
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.
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).
I'll get hate for this post and i know it.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
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.
Never happened. True story.
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.
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.
The poster isn't incompetent necessarily, just completely lazy dumping his research project on an internet forum and hoping other people will google stuff for him while he goes and does what ever he does when he's not working.
I looked into doing this at my place in Seattle. There are a number of options with their own pros and cons. Direct microwave antenna on the roof to the fiber hub downtown was the best option for large buildings, but that's specific to my area and had a large cost of entry.
Ended up not doing anything and I highly recommend it. Best you can do is to tell everyone to go solve the problem themselves and if a few neighbors want to share a connection over a WiFi router that has QOS enabled and split the bill then the association won't report them to the ISP for violating the TOS.
To give you an idea of why this is almost certainly the best option, here is the list of things you should have done as soon as you got this task assigned to you:
do the actual work you've been assigned of getting the list of provider,
examining the different terms of service,
see what options exist,
do a cost benefit analysis,
decide how you want the liability to work,
determine who is responsible for responding to DMCA take-down notices when some teenager is hosting stolen content,
decide what happens if you have a heavy bit torrent user that is reported to you,
who pays the lawyers fees for dealing with issues that may arise,
what binding agreement you are going to give each of your units,
what if they are renting to other tenants,
what if they have an open wifi router connected,
who is going to draft the binding terms of service,
how much is it going to cost just to get the agreement worked out,
how cats and dogs are supposed to live together,
etc...
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.
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.
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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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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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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.
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.
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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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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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
You're actually quite good at formatting badly! :)