Got a beach condo in a small building of 20 condos. We’d like to go “Wi-Fi”.
The building is cinderblock betweens units, cement overhangs/porches and traditional framing and walls/floors otherwise. Good amount of ceramic tile in all units. See pic (should help understand the tech bits needed for Wi-Fi coverage).
Technically, how can we bring Wi-Fi to all the units and common areas (decks/pool)? One wireless router…other ‘boosters’ outside?
Legally, is it okay for one unit owner to subscribe to high-speed internet service (from Comcast in this case) and set up the moderately powerful wireless router(s)?
Right now, I am not wanting to show my hand to Comcast by inquiring too much. I don’t trust them, because all they try to do is pitch the most expensive package for cable, so I don’t want to go in ‘unarmed’ w/out any idea of what I am looking at for Wi-Fi across the building and grounds.
Hmm. Well, I’m not too certain, but I don’t believe there’s anything explicitly illegal about providing free Wi-Fi clouds. My college had it in almost all of their schools and adminsitrative buildings, and were as of my last semester testing the waters for implementing it in the dorms as well. I’m not sure how this was handled, however.
Heck, a while back my entire TOWN was thinking of putting up an entire town Wi-Fi cloud, if I recall correctly. Although again, I am not sure if it would be a restricted access, pay-to-surf kind of dealie, or free Internet access for anyone with a notebook.
I can’t quite tell from your post if you`re just an individual owner of a condo in the building or something more. If it’s part of a business, it’s probably better to be on the up and up. The easy answer is they absolutely don’t want you sharing your connection, and to the extent they can keep you from doing it they will. The language someone posted about not being able to extend the network beyond your premise is just silly though, you don’t have any ability to keep the WiFi signal inside your premise.
So no, they don’t want you to. It’s slightly more ambiguous whether you can or not. If you’re in charge of the building and not just a condo owner it’s probably not worth sneaking around.
In a building that size with that sort of construction, WiFi signal won’t go very far. There are a number of things you can try, and if you want more information I’d be happy to help. Might be better to make a decision about sharing the connection first though.
There are companies that install systems exactly like you want. I don’t have a name handy, and most are regional anyway.
You may have to go to a commercial account with your Internet provider. Mine, Charter, has told me that they don’t care what I do with the signal as long as I don’t exceed the bandwidth I pay for (residential, shared), but other companies are more paranoid. I provide a signal for adjacent neighbors when they come to their weekend houses and bring their laptops and have had no problems with Charter.
You can get more powerful access points and better antennas, also directional ones if that fits your situation. This will be a step up from a $50 Wal-Mart AP, but $300 might cover it, plus mounting. All these things can be provided by a company that specializes in this, also maintenance, so you might not want to go it alone.
There is a condo setup near me with 32 units spread out in a long line along the water. The installation used 2 access points and the signal carries down to the beach. I was told they have several antennas in the attics and it was carefully planned to avoid dead spots.
I’ve heard there is a system with antennas in elevator wells that handles multiple floors better than other schemes.
I am a unit owner, and we – the association of owners – would like WIFI throughout the building and pool area. Heck, getting it out to the beach would be sweet.
Based on remarks so far, we need a commercial account and some WIFI setup requiring an investment of at least 300 bucks, but probably nothing off the charts as far as expense.
Musicat, I think I will reach out to the company you mentioned, as they say they do nationwide WIFI integrations.
I haven’t pulled up the Comcast terms of service, but I’ll bet there’s a FAP (Fair Access Policy) section in there somewhere. Basically stating that if you go over a preset limit in a billing period they reserve the right to throttle or even shut off your service for the rest of the billing period. Some companies have it set up as a 30 day rolling window, YMMV.
So get yourself a few customers streaming movies to their laptops. Or downloading torrents. And you’ll find yourself against that limit pretty quickly.
So, Philster, it’s been a zombie’s lifetime since you posed this question 6 years ago. How did you solve your problem? Did you hire a commercial WiFi installation service as I suggested in Post #6 or roll your own? And how’s it working?
In case you haven’t solved the problem yet after four years…
Our new member who revived this thread is right: The simplest way to set up wi-fi over a medium-sized area on the cheap is to buy a decent unmanaged network switch (go for 16 port gigabit) and a handful of wireless routers.
Set up one of the routers as your Internet gateway. Configure it as a DHCP server (it probably is already set up like this) and plug one of its LAN ports into your switch. Block out a section of addresses from DHCP for use in the next section: you might set your DHCP range as “start at 192.168.1.10 and go to 192.168.1.254” for example. The out-of-range addresses will be used as static addresses for your individual routers.
Configure all of the remaining routers as wireless access points, as follows:
[ul]
[li]Turn off DHCP server[/li][li]Assign a different local IP address (other than 192.168.1.1) to each one, but within the same network (e.g. 192.168.1.2, .3, .4, etc)[/li][li]Set the wi-fi SSID, security config, and password to be the same on each one[/li][li]Choose a different wi-fi channel for each one, in such a way as to minimize close channels being used by physically close wireless access points.[/li][/ul]Run a long CAT-6 cable from the switch to each of your routers, in a star configuration. Plug the cable into one of the “LAN” ports (not the WAN port).
Your cables can be up to 300’ long. If you need longer, you will have to have an intervening device.
This configuration will allow you to carry your iPad all over the property, and it will automagically hand off from one wireless access point to the next, always maintaining a network connection. Such a configuration should be pretty stable for years, so once you get past the initial setup you can leave it be.
One note: In my experience, once the number of gadgets and computers reaches some threshold (30 or 40), the main router that is doing the heavy lifting (gateway stuff, DHCP server and firewall) can begin to get flaky. Home routers weren’t designed to handle the bookkeeping for so many devices—even browsing the Web results in vast quantities of open sockets, each occupying a slot in the NAT lookup table in the gateway. In such a case, you might need to consider a commercial device, or run PFSense or m0n0wall on a spare computer and use that as your gateway.