Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Site wide internet?

[Bryan Syverson (bryan.syverson]

Hi, Will,

Here at La Querencia Cohousing in Fresno, CA, we have site-wide internet,
both wired and wireless.  Everything is paid for out of our HOA dues.  (For
the first couple of years, we charged extra for the service, but it was a
pain for the Treasurer (me, at the time) to charge and collect this so we
bundled it into the dues.)

Geeky details:  We have 8 residential buildings (either duplex or six-plex)
that make up our 28 homes.  The distance to the common house for the
furthest was too long for copper, so we have fiber-optic pulls between all
the buildings.  In addition, this provides us the future possibility of
providing gigabit to the desktop without pulling new cables.

In the common house we have a layer-3 Ethernet switch that feeds the 8
building switches.  We have two high-speed internet service providers
(Comcast cable @150Mbps & AT&T DSL @20Mbps).  We are likely going to
upgrade the Comcast service to 250Mbps.  When we first got the Comcast line
8 years ago, Comcast balked at us "sharing" the line which was a violation
of their terms of service.  However, they still provided service and
haven't mentioned it again.  AT&T never asked.

The two modems feed into a Mushroom Network Broadband Bonding Network
Appliance (BBNA) which feeds into the main switch.  The BBNA is somewhat
convenient but not essential.  It does load-balancing between the two ISPs
(and could do so for up to 2 more ISPs, if we had others available here,
which we don't).  We set it up 8 years ago with two ISPs and the BBNA
because of fears of outages of one ISP or the other.  That happened more
frequently back then; we might do away with AT&T as 2nd ISP and the BBNA in
the near future.

We provide wired access available in each home and in the common house and
exercise building, although wired access is almost never used in the common
building (except by guests in the guest room).  We have community-wide WiFi
with 14 Wireless Access Points (WAPs).  These are made by Open Mesh, are
inexpensive, and work great (I got that tip from Cohousing-L, thank you!).
Highly recommended.

Our buildings are extremely well insulated, which also makes each home a
tidy Faraday cage which diminishes signal strength inside each unit.  So
most homes have their own WiFi router rather than relying solely on the
Community WIFi.

Users love WiFi, but don't neglect the wired infrastructure necessary to
distribute it.  Good luck.

-Bryan
La Querencia Fresno Cohousing

Hi,

I am new to cohousing (less than a year) and just found/subscribed to this
list. I live at the Hearthstone in Denver, CO:http://hearthstonecohousing.com/

There is a long standing committee here to implement some sort of shared
community internet I wondered if anyone might have suggestions. I have just
joined the committee here and am researching possibilities.

The idea here is to have a large capacity connection to our common house,
then feed each unit from there.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Will Carter