Condominium Network Setup-HELP!

[dk74]

Hey,

I'm thinking about creating a network for the whole condo. I'm talking 40 unit condo. Of course not all 40 people would use my network but you get the picture. I have couple questions before I will decide if I should do it or not.

FYI. - I have a 30mb connection so I think it should hold up couple extra PCs.

1.Is there any software that could set a limitation for each individual user DL/UP speed?
2.The ceilings of this Condo are made from concrete so I'm not sure what ROUTER I should go with-Will G be enough or N?-Any suggestions very welcome
3. Anything else I should consider prior this Idea?



In advance Thanks for all replies.

Regards,

Bart

 

[criccio]

Are you going to get paid for this? If not, forget it.

 

[dk74]

=) of course

 

[cyr0n_k0r]

don't try this.
Most ISP's (pretty much all ISP's) have stipulations in their terms of service that prevent you from reselling the connection to 3rd parties.
it might sound new, but you aren't the first person that has thought of this. And ISP's have lots of lawyers.

 

[OmegaAvenger]

Hey,

I'm thinking about creating a network for the whole condo. I'm talking 40 unit condo. Of course not all 40 people would use my network but you get the picture. I have couple questions before I will decide if I should do it or not.

FYI. - I have a 30mb connection so I think it should hold up couple extra PCs.

1.Is there any software that could set a limitation for each individual user DL/UP speed?
2.The ceilings of this Condo are made from concrete so I'm not sure what ROUTER I should go with-Will G be enough or N?-Any suggestions very welcome
3. Anything else I should consider prior this Idea?



In advance Thanks for all replies.

Regards,

Bart

30 pcs? not with that upload speed.

 

[gimp]

it's most likely against the ISP's EULA also, even if you are not "reselling" the service.

 

[OmegaAvenger]

it's most likely against the ISP's EULA also, even if you are not "reselling" the service.

Yeah, its probably saying you can't share it between multiple residences, and apartments and condos count as multiple residences.

 

[pissboy]

If the condo/homeowner association is incorporated, see about having them purchase a business class service. Since you are all members of the association, you are all purchasing it.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Get Comcasts 50/10 business package. For 40x condo units to share it, $189/mo split up amongst them...

If need cheaper, they have a 22/5 business package for $89/month.

Implement a solid router with good QoS.

 

[Striker109]

YeOlde's right. For a 40 person network I would assume that 1/3 would be online at any given time. Perhaps 1/2 or more at night. The upload limit on 30/2 is going to hurt. 10 megabit upload should be sufficient. How do you plan to deliver the internet to each condo unit? Some sort of hardwired system or wireless?

You might want to also look at metro ethernet if it is available in your area. I've seen 100/100 megabit connections for as little as $800.00 per month in some cases (only a 2 year contact no less!). Good luck with your project!

 

[Orinthical]

You are not going to be able to do this with a single router nor with a residential ISP as has been mentioned. At best you'll need at least one commercial grade WAP per floor though for the cost, hard-wiring might actually be a better bet - depends on how the building is set up and how serious you about about this venture.

If you can get a block of 40 IP addresses from your provider, you can just implement a switch and deliver wired ethernet to each unit - leaving the choice of whether or not to go wireless up to them. This avoids double-nat'ing and ensures security by allowing for individual routers/security boundaries. If you purchase a good switch with rate limiting or QoS you can still ensure individual units cannot absorb all of the available bandwidth - and if a unit doesn't pay his/her monthly bill, shut the switchport off.

There are vastly more complex ways to look at it but it all depends on what you are actually hoping to accomplish here. If you're just hoping to be a 'good neighbor' then do yourself a favor and forget this now but if you're serious about doing this the right way and becoming a community provider, it could be worth it. Keep in mind all of the other issues here; if you are the end-point, you are responsible. The units cannot call your business ISP and complain or report issues - you have to. You'll need to be on-call or available for support issues, you'll need to fix issues and help your units get and stay online. You'll need to compete price-wise against other options such as DSL and Cable.

Are you really prepared to do that?

 

[Striker109]

I somehow missed the last sentence in the OP's post. I didn't realize concrete was involved. I just wrapped up a feasibility study for a MDU internet solution for multi-story condo complex. It was quite the learning experience! I got a real education on all the complexities and deployment issues one will face when implementing such a project. We looked at wifi, DOCSIS, and DSL for passing internet to each condo unit. Ethernet was not an option due to the building's configuration.

There is a LOT of things involved with a community wide setup. Who handles supports? How are you going to manage the bandwidth? What's your policy on "high bandwidth usage" clients? Are you going to allow BitTorrent? What are you using for a billing manager? What happens when XYZ tenant can't get a wireless signal in their bedroom?

Equipment wise you can't just install a few Linksys wifi routers and call it a day. There are a LOT of options to consider when talking about a commercial deployment. Have you given any consideration to a hardwired based network? Are there any cable chases between the floors (assuming the condo complex is multi-story)? Are you able to route fiber or ethernet cable to each condo unit?

As Orinthical pointed out it's preferable to hand off a public IP address to each condo owner. Let the condo owner handle their own wifi, router, etc. It will save you time and money as you don't have to support it. If you can provide pictures of the complex and an overhead layout of the property, I think we all can come up with a working solution. Just be prepared that the installation and equipment cost will probably run at least a few thousand dollars at the minimum.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

If you can provide pictures of the complex and an overhead layout of the property, I think we all can come up with a working solution. Just be prepared that the installation and equipment cost will probably run at least a few thousand dollars at the minimum.

This will probably help. When I read "condo complex" I picture what I'm used to around my shoreline area...tightly packed ones in the downtown areas, usually a building or a couple that are close together and several stories high.

But if it's a more sprawling complex...certainly what someone mentioned above may work better...have them drop a run to each building, and setup a router at each building.

Demographics of the condo units...this might dictate which approach is best. If it's younger and populated with families (kids)...certainly as mentioned above, having the people get their own internet may be better..since kids can be demanding on it.

If it's a condo complex for seniors...you have a piece of cake to setup, they'll mostly be AOL users (or at least simple e-mail and light web surfing).

I would shy away from wireless as the only delivery method...most condo complexes I've seen and lived in, they usually have utility conduits making things easy to get to all the units.

Probably a good idea to offer the service as "basic", and have tenants have the option of getting their own internet if they demand more performance of have kids that want to do stuff like online gaming.

 

[SilentDoh!]

If you want to cover your complex and you are looking into making this into a business look into Wimax here is the" How Stuff Works " explanation of it.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wimax.htm

 

[acesea]

If you can get a block of 40 IP addresses from your provider, you can just implement a switch and deliver wired ethernet to each unit - leaving the choice of whether or not to go wireless up to them. This avoids double-nat'ing and ensures security by allowing for individual routers/security boundaries.

If each unit was assigned a public ip is there any method for each unique tenant's wired and wireless devices to possess the same assigned public wan ip and coexist in the same vlan? What would it involve to setup a wifi deployment that identified and was aware of each unique tenant wirelessly connecting them to their apartment unit's wired vlan?

Ethernet was not an option due to the building's configuration.

Would you mind elaborating on an ethernet configuration possibly taking into account the details I cite below?

As Orinthical pointed out it's preferable to hand off a public IP address to each condo owner. Let the condo owner handle their own wifi, router, etc. It will save you time and money as you don't have to support it.

Is there no value proposition in providing a secure ready to use connection? What type of support issues may be prevalent?

If you want to cover your complex and you are looking into making this into a business look into Wimax here is the" How Stuff Works " explanation of it.
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/wimax.htm

Has Wimax really penetrated the laptop or other personal device market?




Bart (dk74),

I am involved with a very similar project and will share some of our experiences. By the way, are you planning on a wired, wireless, hybrid deployment?

Our recent residential apartment building project is several floors tall, rectangular in shape, concrete construction, with the indoor garage and electrical room demarc on ground floor. The housing demographics are predominantly working professionals. Each apartment has an enclosed recessed in wall low voltage electrical box in the utility/laundry closet housing several cat5e cables but the nearest 115vac outlet is several feet away. One cat5e in this low voltage electrical box is from the ground floor demarc. The other additional cat5e cables run to and terminate in each bedroom, living room, and the kitchen in a star topology.

Before I started working on deploying data and internet access in the building all the cat5e blue pair of wires were used for analog pots voice which also integrated with the building's intercom system which controlled the lobby speaker and door entry strike system. Tenants use any touchtone phone to speak with guests at the lobby entrance and buzz them in.

Since the building was new and now fully occupied I preferred not to pull additional cables to each apartment. I realized that the preexisting cat5e had only 2 of the 4 pairs remaining for supplying both data and power since I wanted to provision the other 2 pairs for analog voice lines. The goals were to provide wired ethernet to each room in each apartment over the preexisting cat5e infrastructure utilizing open source solutions. Through this process I would become familiarized with the building's cabling design and prepare for the possibility of needing to pull new cat5e in the future for a wifi deployment or if any of the preexisting cat5e had damaged pairs.

In the demarc on the ground floor a solid state IBM T41 Thinkpad running m0n0wall or pfsense would provide routing with the wan connected to an intel pro/100 cardbus nic and the onboard intel gigabit nic connect to HP ProCurve 2610 switches. 100Base-TX switching is supported in addition to full power over ethernet using mode A / phantom poe over 2 pairs of cat5e wire. 80 cat5e cables from the switch have the orange and green pairs terminated to each respective apartment on the 66 blocks at the demarc while AT&T and the intercom system connected to the 66 blocks using blue and brown pairs. 80 cat5e cables connect from the 66 blocks and run up each floor through the electrical pvc conduit in the trash chute corridor and separate on each respective floor branching out into a smaller pvc running to each individual apartment's utility closet low voltage electrical box.

In each apartment's utility closet low voltage electrical box the cat5e run from the ground floor has the orange and green pairs T568B crimped in an rj45 adapter that is connected to a Trendnet poe splitter TPE-102S. Data and power from the poe splitter is provided to a 5 port Trendnet switch TE100-S5. The remaining blue and brown pairs are individually connected circuits for analog voice. The cat5e cables running from the low voltage electrical box to each room terminates at the wall plates' keystone jacks. One rj11 for the blue pair, one rj11 for the brown pair, and one rj45 cat5e for the T568B orange and green pair.

Thus far I have a couple of apartments connected as trial tests with no issues after having conducted some iperf tests etc. There is only 1 wan ip and the router and hp procurve switch are in the process of being setup so that each apartment is isolated in a vlan. The advantages with this setup is the seamless integration with the preexisting cat5e, centralized redundant power supply, each individual apartment containing its own 100mbit lan, and a ready to use plug n play secure wired internet. This system also allows for substituting an apartment's 100mbit 5 port switch with a low power green gigabit unit and offering gigabit intranet lans into rooms where all the cat5e pairs are dedicated to data without any voice rj11 terminations.


Maybe some of the following questions and concerns may be of interest to you:
-In order to future proof a solution in the event that wifi is also deployed and integrated with the wired system what are the recommendations as to implementing Qos, bandwidth throttling / rate limiting, tiered bandwidth speed packages, etc? Is radius the solution since the procurve switch is lacking in ability to provide these requirements?
-Is it possible to create an environment where a tenant may disconnect their laptop from the building's wired network and then wirelessly connect to one of the building's waps while still retaining bandwidth and speed limits as well as continuing to have access to devices in their apartment's wired vlan?

I would appreciate anyone pointing me in the right direction regarding the above questions.

 

[Striker109]

Would you mind elaborating on an ethernet configuration possibly taking into account the details I cite below?

I'm not a big fan of running voice and data on the same line. First of all it's not a recognized standard configuration. Second interference can become a major issue when the phone rings.

Is there no value proposition in providing a secure ready to use connection? What type of support issues may be prevalent?

It all depends on how your support contract is written with the building. To me most want to consider you a communication provider like AT&T or Comcast. You're only called if there is an issue with the line itself. The building is then charged for the service call (usually after the warranty period is over). If you have a yearly maintenance agreement, then a certain number of service calls would be included.

A resident would be charged if they are having a personal issue with their computer system. Wifi not working, can't connect to the router, etc are all legitimate service calls that would get billed to the resident since it is not service related. It's their choice if they want a tech out to troubleshoot and fix their problem.

 

[jeffmoss26]

I did not know you could do POE over 2 pairs...

 

[acesea]

I'm not a big fan of running voice and data on the same line. First of all it's not a recognized standard configuration. Second interference can become a major issue when the phone rings.

I share your concerns but proceeded with the non standard config given the circumstances. Ideally additional wiring ought to be installed at the time of construction or wire install to future proof unforeseen needs.

We needed to integrate with the intercom and telephone system so we used the preexisting 66 blocks. What would be the best method to limited attenuation when terminating this non standard voice and data config on 66 blocks? The orange and green data pairs are on adjacent rows. Should the blue and brown voice pairs also be on adjacent rows? Would there be any ill effects on the data or voice signals if a cables' data pairs were surrounded by a voice pair on top and another below?

When a phone line is active how would you test and identify cables demonstrating excessive interference?

I did not know you could do POE over 2 pairs...

Many individuals assume power over ethernet must utilize unoccupied pairs but in fact poe over 1000BASE-T gigabit provides power even when all 4 pairs are occupied by data thanks to the phantom power spec.

I look forward to devices supporting the new IEEE 802.3at-2009 amendment raising power from ~15 to ~25 watts which some manufacturers designate as poe+. This ought to open the possibilities of greater device integration with residential building smart devices and appliances etc.

 

[Striker109]

What would be the best method to limited attenuation when terminating this non standard voice and data config on 66 blocks? The orange and green data pairs are on adjacent rows. Should the blue and brown voice pairs also be on adjacent rows? Would there be any ill effects on the data or voice signals if a cables' data pairs were surrounded by a voice pair on top and another below?

When a phone line is active how would you test and identify cables demonstrating excessive interference?

Unfortunately, that is above my pay grade. I deal mainly in servers and setting up networks. I leave the wiring to the wiring vendors due to cost and time involved to pull the wire.

However, all those small twisted pairs are in the same cable jacket. What affects one cable could very well affect the other seven. I don't deal with telephones so I honestly can't answer anything specific about interference.

 

[acesea]

Several months ago I successfully finished the cat5e ethernet wired setup/install in an apartment building I commented on earlier. Pfsense 2.0 has been operating well with each apartment isolated in its own vlan with throttling and qos enabled and wans with failover setup.

I am now researching how best to deploy wireless in this residential building. The ability to throttle, provide limits, or qos per wireless connection or all devices belonging to an apartment may be beneficial. Seamless roaming and n band is not a requirement. I foresee managing autonomous waps as a hassle. Weighing cost versus effectiveness while aware of the learning/testing involved some options are:
-deploy 15 waps poe powered from procurve switches and individually configure each with wpa(2)-psk.
-enhance the above with radius, captive portal, etc to assist in AAA. btw, how could tenant turnover be automatically streamlined with the least intervention or management on my part but with some decent security?
-centrally managed controller for all the waps. what would this entail?

The geek in me is interested in possibly associating wireless devices with their apartment's physical wired vlan. I assume this implementation could be accomplished either through radius or waps broadcasting unique ssids for each apartment which associate with the corresponding pfsense opt interface and vlan.

Any recommendations for poe waps? The Ruckus ZoneFlex lineup is interesting. I am aware of the Dlink product lineup and other than the DAP-2553, the DWS-4026 and DWL-8600AP is too $$$ and for early adopters while the DES-1228P DES-1228P are poorly rated on Newegg. I have looked at Engenius, ie EAP-3660, EAP9550. What other products should I review?

I would appreciate any comments or suggestions on any of this.

Edit/update Oct 28, 10: Testing a few procurve and engeniuss waps...

 

[cymon]

Each pair of wires carries one signal (in fast ethernet, only 2 pairs carry anything). Ethernet Copper physical layer is a balanced medium. The tip side of the pair (the one with the white stripe iirc) carries a signal. The ring side of the pair carries the exact opposite signal. This configuration has several advantages. A. The voltages are symmetric with respect to ground, this makes the configuration much easier since grounding is not required between each device, if there is a potential difference (WRT earth ground) at one spot, the rest are not affected (the two signals are symmetric w.r.t. whatever 0 volts is at either end. B. There is no net magnetic field surrounding the pair, since the currents are flowing in exactly the opposite direction, this reduces interference significantly. C. Noise is greatly reduced (usually 60 to 80dB depending on the op amps used). These pairs are terminated into op amps, which cancel out any signals that are the exact same on both lines. Since the real signal is completely inverted between each line, the only common factor is noise that gets coupled in.

 

[dashpuppy]

There was a guy here in town that tried doing this at his new apartment complex, the owner thought he would pull the wool over "SHAWCABLE" eye's. Guess how long it took for shaw to come in and remove the cable from the poll to the building ?

 

[Dangman]

There was a guy here in town that tried doing this at his new apartment complex, the owner thought he would pull the wool over "SHAWCABLE" eye's. Guess how long it took for shaw to come in and remove the cable from the poll to the building ?

Two days?

 

[dashpuppy]

Two days?

45 min

One of the apartment renters called into shaw asking for help setting up his email and stuff, they said there is no internet at his apartment, he replied with yes there is, the landlord charges us 25$ each for wired internet POOF down goes the cable

LOL!

 

[acesea]

Fortunately Pfsense offers loadbalancing and installing lots of dsl modems is usually trivial.

 

[Dangman]

45 min

One of the apartment renters called into shaw asking for help setting up his email and stuff, they said there is no internet at his apartment, he replied with yes there is, the landlord charges us 25$ each for wired internet POOF down goes the cable

LOL!

LOL!

 

[marley1]

we did something similar for a 40 unit beachfront condo for some old people, we used UBNT Pico Station, 8 of them, POE Switch, and RV series, on a 30/10 business connection. We have AP Isolation installed, so the devices can't see each other. If a room wanted a wireless printer and such, we sold them a Pepwave Surf which grabs the Condo wifi, and rebroadcast a private one in the room.

Works out good.

Engenius gear is good, dirt cheap, and they have ceiling and wall mount units which makes it nice.