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?"

Re:Don't be stupid. Hire someone.

[1karmik1]

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.

Re:No offense, but...

[sortadan]

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...

The standard setup in Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I disagree

[tanveer1979]

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.

Re:No offense, but...

[Psychotria]

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant [wikipedia.org]

Re:From the point of view of the Network Engineer

[bbn]

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 [farummidtpunkt.dk]

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.

Re:Distribution

[PIBM]

1Gb unmetered fiber for a company runs at 1500$ per month in Quebec city, while 175/175mbs runs at 130$ per month for a end user (with a stupid 300GB cap). A 1Gb pipe would provide a minimum of 12mbps for everyone with a running cost of less than 20$ per month while a user would pay 55$ here for such speed and would have a download cap of 120GB. I don`t know how much is a 10Gb pipe but I'd certainly look it up ;)