Netonix Forums

How do you guys handle apartment buildings?

We have a complex manager of a 125 unit complex that is interested in us providing service to tenants. They're willing to hand out our information to all new tenets. At this point we're up to 15 customers in the complex.

Like most apartment complexes they're fairly strict with mounting of dishes and such. Everything must be clamped to balconys and not screwed into the structure, etc. The difficulty is there are 5 separate buildings arranged in a octagon layout and only one side of each building faces a tower.

My first thought was, I hope the phone cabling is cat5, but sadly not. There's no central access corridor, conduit or anything like that.

I'm to the point now where I'm thinking a unifi installation. With 25 units per building and given the distance I think 6 to 9 UAPs would cover each building well.

so Unifi for individual customer access? Would the customer's get a 'CPE' aka wireless bridge in their unit? I think we are missing a key feature in unifi to do that, and that is RADIUS VLANs, but that's *coming. You'd still need to wire the unifi units up. You could flash some unifi units with openwrt and use packetfence to handle this. Giving each customer a dedicated VLAN. Still, the first person to install their own wifi router clogs everything up.

With 25 units per building, consider vDSL. Look at the zhone bitstorm units. You can use a single CPE to feed each building, and then utilize the existing CAT3 wire, which is certain to perform well at such limited distances. I've used a pair of VDSL2 modems (zhone makes a ptp mode model) over 1000' of CAT3 to link two buildings with existing wire at 100FDX. Backhaul into the building with a single radio eliminating most of the trouble from not being able to do direct mounts.

also, because you can do PTP mode on some of the zhone modems, you could just backhaul in and put a modem in the utility room for each customer until you could justify the DSLAM. Then when you can, you repurpose the utility room side of the PTP DSL back into CPE.

Thanks for that. I had completely forgotten about their modems doing ptp!