Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Shared Internet [was HOA Dues Structures

[Yochai Gal (yochaigal]

Yes, replacing 10/100 switches is great (though gigabit generally won't
help much unless you have fiber).

I currently pay Comcast around $100/mo for 1000/40, and it's awful - the
"up" speed, that is. In Belmont (where I moved from) FioS cost $54/mo for
125/125, and the high upload speed actually made my speeds feel much faster
(especially for the work I do).

I'm currently discussing splitting costs with a neighbor, and simply
connecting our homes with wireless nodes (which are excellent these days).
Many communities - such as mine - were not built with networked homes, and
it is indeed true that wireless - especially microwave and 5G - is the
future. Fortunately, we do not need to run cables between homes anymore.

If folks were willing to rely on wireless nodes (microwave) to provide
Internet to each home, it would likely only cost  around $1000 per unit,
including labor.  They would still need to purchase individual access
points or routers for each home ($200 for modern mesh), but they would not
need to pay for Internet each month. You would still need decent equipment
($1000+) where the ISP connection comes in, and a monthly plan akin to what
you describe (failover is awesome).

On Sun, Sep 6, 2020, 3:59 PM Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
wrote:

> > On Sep 6, 2020, at 2:58 PM, Yochai Gal <yochaigal [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Is that 200/20 each unit, or total? And aside from the WAN failover
> between the two ISPs, do you also Do load balancing (e.g. combine both
> connections for a faster connection)?
>
> Two accounts with 200/20 for all 43 units. And it is fast. I recently had
> to upgrade my switches because they were 10/100, not 10/100/1000. My speeds
> are now close to 200/20. Maybe Friday evening it is slower. The tech pod
> has software so they can see the load and when it is frequently at full
> capacity, they increase the service.
>
> And I think we do load balancing. We have had problems with the two modems
> having different IP addresses. Some connections don’t like changing IP
> addresses so there has been a desire to divide the units between the two
> modems and just switch everyone to the one that works when one is down. I
> don’t know how that was solved.
>
> > The city our community resides in (Northampton, MA) is considering
> community fiber, but until then we are sort of stuck with Comcast cable per
> household, unfortunately.
>
> It does help to have the two companies. One service or the other will
> often be down for only a few minutes, so when we didn’t have both services
> there were frequent complaints about the internet being down again.
>
> The person who used to do our reserve studies and advise us on technology
> and trends said don’t even bother thinking about upgrading your wiring.
> Everything is going wireless.
>
> Nice to have a person who actually knows this stuff on the list.
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
>