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

[Yochai Gal (yochaigal]

This setup sounds ideal, though I'd still push for internal access points
for each household. I have multiple APs (all Ubiquiti) in my home, and Zoom
works flawlessly basically anywhere. That is one reason why I'd go with a
Ubiquiti AirOS option over their standard Unifi units. In my experience it
handles point-to-point connections better (I've done this for solar
inverter deployments a few times).

Who manages the network at your community? Are they compensated somehow? Is
there an external MSP that manages any aspect?

Thanks.

On Mon, Sep 7, 2020, 8:35 AM Henning Mortensen <hmortensen [at] gmail.com> 
wrote:

> At Prairie Spruce with 21 units we began with a single 300/140 feed. We had
> intended to get another similar feed from another provider
> but found that we are not using near the bandwidth I was expecting. Usually
> we are using less than 10 mbps. If we ever need more we will pursue
> load balancing and failover at that time. I am still seeing 280/120 at my
> computer. 280 mbps is plenty speedy.
>
> We have deployed 7 ubiquiti uap-ap-pro wifi points and have connection
> almost everywhere in the building. (even in the workshop).
> We also have wired internet to each of the 21 units.
>
> I have had a number of complaints that the wifi was not strong enough for
> zoom and such. I find the wifi will connect at distance but the speed is
> reduced.
> I recommend that people use the wired internet as much as possible. Wifi
> works for email and browsing, but you need to be close to the access point
> to stream video. Our radios are in the hallway between the units so the
> signal has to go through walls and such.
>
> When talking with your providers, you should talk about providing wifi in
> the common house. I was able to get one feed for the whole building by
> emphasizing that we are a corporation and we need internet for our common
> house. In the end the provider wired the connection right into our computer
> room/closet, and proposed a contract with us that reduced our total cost to
> $75/month ($3.50/unit) for the first five years
>
> We then replaced the three telephones which were installed for enterphone,
> elevator and alarm monitoring with Voip phones and saved $120/month so it
> is as though our internet is free.
> We use voip.ms    It is very inexpensive. We spent 1.30 for the last six
> months of enterphone. As the elevator and alarm are only calling out to
> 1-800 number there is no charge for those calls. Voip.ms has a
> referal service where both the referer and the referee get an extra $10
> credit with this we ended up with $45 in our enterphone account, $25 in
> each of the other two for a total spend of $45. I would be happy to provide
> the initial referal. Once you have the first account set up, use that to
> set up the others.
>
> please note that using our voip for elevator and alarm monitoring was only
> done after we had battery backup for both the voip and also the internet
> service. Our system will run for 30 minutes during a power outage.
>
> Another thing that we did was to wire up our boiler and ERV using Bacnet/IP
> to transmit the data over our network. We use a Bacnet Explorer to read all
> sorts of telemetry from these devices.
> It is really handy to be able to see what the systems are doing. We have
> sort of hooked up a poorman's BAS system, something we removed from our
> build in rightsizing the project (it was going to cost 50,000. So far we
> have spent ~$200, to be able to retrieve, log, and graph the information
> these systems provide. This is not all full BAS system, as we can not
> control the devices at this point, we can only read the data.
>
> Well, I hope I have given you something to think about. I have really
> enjoyed setting things up for my community. Am happy to help anyone trying
> to do the same.
> Henning Mortensen
>
> ps. We were able to find used gigabit switches for $30. These are first
> generation gigabit switches but they work well. We use DLink dgs1024
> switches. They are a bit power hungry but we can work on that as we
> upgrade.
>
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 12:59 PM Yochai Gal <yochaigal [at] gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello. I'm a network engineer/sysadmin by trade, so this interests me
> > highly.
> >
> > 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)?
> >
> > 200/20 shared between 34 units is paltry for that size, even considering
> > low-usage per household. Frankly I'd be amazed if this was the case. The
> > biggest issue would be the upload speed, but even then 200Mbps down split
> > 34 ways with average usage isn't ideal.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Thanks for the info!
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 6, 2020, 2:26 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
> > cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:
> >
> > > > On Sep 1, 2020, at 9:23 PM, Yochai Gal <yochaigal [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > You have a shared Internet plan?
> > > > Can you expound on that?
> > >
> > > We initially wired all our units for internet connections just like we
> > did
> > > for telephone connections. We went through many iterations of things to
> > > find out what worked. We had to find the balance between being a
> business
> > > and being a residential complex.
> > >
> > > Finally ended up with 2 business-class modem accounts from 2 providers,
> > > Comcast and RCN. When one service is out, the other is still working.
> > > Because they are business class, we get faster service if there are
> modem
> > > problems.
> > >
> > > We have 200/20 service and it serves all 43 units plus the CH very
> well.
> > > That’s with everyone home now and doing streaming as well as computer
> > work.
> > >
> > > The future is wireless so you might not need wired at all. We now have
> > > wireless connections everywhere—I think 3 routers reach most units.
> Some
> > > wireless routers owned by the community and several people having their
> > own
> > > but they share them.
> > >
> > > This is much much cheaper than everyone having their own service, and
> > > certainly cheaper than everyone having their own 200.20 service. You
> can
> > > calculate this by going to your local cable provider’s website.
> > >
> > > Sharon
> > > ----
> > > Sharon Villines
> > > Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> > > http://www.takomavillage.org
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
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