Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re:Geek question WiFi/ 802.11

[Matt Lawrence (matt]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Lon Goldstein wrote:

> Just wanted to say thank you for all the input on the wireless 
> networking question!  This will be an evolving question as we move 
> toward construction next Fall (cross fingers).  We just need to look 
> at cost for installing conduit / wiring now so want to know if 
> wireless is an option to keep in mind.  I'm strongly hoping we can 
> get the budget to at least put in conduit between all the buildings 
> and the common house for now so we have more options in the future 
> (even if we don't have budget for the wires right now.)
> Wireless offers another approach, and possible fall back if we can't 
> afford wiring.  (I'm talking between buildings.  Within buildings 
> there will be some basic level of CAT-5 and coax wiring, which will 
> vary in each unit depending on the upgrade package each owner opts 
> for.)

Another reason is for running telephone wiring.  Having a single demarc in
the common house has a lot to recommend it and some folks have gone as far
as getting a phone switch.  This has the advantage of reducing the number
of lines to the CO, adding in lots of features that you don't have to pay
the phone company for (call waiting, voicemail, etc.) and it's very easy
to make a telephone line appear in multiple locations.  For example, I
enjoy woodworking and will spend lots of time in a workshop so it would be
really spiffy to be able to have my phone ring both at home and in the
workshop.  With a multiline phone in the workshop, it could easily handle
the folks who are spending lots of time there.  And, on a related note, 25
pair Cat5 is available.  I really wish I had used it instead of 4x 4 pair
Cat5 when wiring my house.

In addition, if it's easy to run coax everywhere, having a single
satellite dish and electronics (like many hotes/motels use) to pipe
television around is a good thing.  I also expect that it would be cheaper
and more esthetically pleasing than having lots of dishes all around the
place.

Another reason is for having faster connectivity than WiFi is for various
types of resource sharing among the residents.  Currently I'm building a
backup solution for my home network which has well over 100GB of disk and
I expect it to increase to over 1TB within the next 18 months.  Trying to
backup that amount of data over WiFi would be painful.  I expect that at
least a couple of my machines will be upgraded to gigabit ethernet as
well.  Also, I'm spending over $2K for the hardware (a commercial tape
library system would run over 10K and I have seen some that were over $1M)
and lots of my time writing the software so I'd really like to be able to
share this resource with others.

One of my hot buttons about cohousing is that I beleive that it should
create an environment where the sharing of resources is easy but not
required.  To me this also includes designing and building in such a
manner that modifications are easy to make and running conduit for future
use is a great example.

-- Matt


_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l