Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: data infrastructure

[Howard Landman (howard]

> I'm writing to see if anyone out there has built high speed data 
> infrastructure into their community.  We're going to (hopefully) be 
> entering the infrastructure building phase in about 4 months here at 
> Pacifica (nee. Bolin Creek) in North Carolina, and we're beginning to 
> look at costing out conduit, looking at using fibre vs copper, etc. I 
> was wondering who's done what out there, and what your experiences were, 
> what advice do you have, anything really.

Conduit.  Then you can upgrade later.

We ran cat5 to each building.  With a central server/firewall in the common
house getting DSL, two ethernet cards (north and south subnets), one level
of hubs to extend the range to the farthest buildings, a second level of hub
in each building, and room left for a third level of hub in each unit for
future expansion.

We charged people $75 per unit for setup and ongoing costs are currently
under $3/month/unit except for the heaviest users who pay a surcharge if
we go over our bandwidth quota.  That seems to be good enough, although
our usage keeps growing on average so we're starting to look for a higher
bandwidth solution for next year.

Be sure to mark the conduit and talk to the construction people.  Make sure
it gets on all the official diagrams.  We had an idiot run a backhoe through
our southside main conduit, cutting not only all the data but also all the
telephone lines for half the complex.  He claimed to not know it was
supposed to be there.  The developer had to eat the cost of repair and was
not happy about it.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, Colorado
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