Broadband Communities

2014 Summit Special Preview

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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35 Summit Broadband in Florida is successfully doing both fber to the unit and fber to the foor in large condo complexes on San Marco Island, Naples and elsewhere. Condo associations have contracted with Summit to provide fber-to-the-foor, but individual condo owners can get the fber extended all the way to their units for a nominal extra charge. Leaving the fate of their tenants to the investment whims of local service providers is often as unappealing to landlords as it is to community ofcials who have built fber where incumbents have elected not to. Te community wants to attract the best and brightest, and fber to the home is a strong incentive to make that happen. Te MDU owner wants to minimize tenant churn and maximize occupancy rates. Hear Smeltzer talk about building broadband communities SOLVING THE MOBILITY ISSUE WITH A HYBRID APPROACH Te community and MDU paths diverge a little, though, when it comes to Wi-Fi and meeting the mobility needs of residents. In a typical residential subdivision, each home can have its own private Wi-Fi network, and while you may be able to see your neighbor's SSID's the actual channel interference in the 2.4 GHz band is usually tolerable. When more Wi-Fi usage is pushed to the 5 GHz band, there will be more non-overlapping channels available and interference will become even less of an issue in a typical residential neighborhood. But Wi-Fi interference is much harder to solve in an MDU environment. Here the neighboring Wi-Fi access points are much closer to each other horizontally and vertically. If every tenant in an MDU sets up his or her own Wi-Fi access point with no central coordination, there is a good chance that interference from neighbors' units will degrade the Wi-Fi experience, even freezing each others' routers. Even 5 GHz won't work where each customer demands access to a lot of bandwidth and the MDU units are densely situated. Tis suggests that a hybrid solution may be optimal in the long term. Te landlord (or a partner service provider) builds fber to every unit, and then layers a complex-wide Wi-Fi system using some of that fber. It provides coverage in all of the public and private areas of the complex, and each individual user gets a unique login and password; it's called WPA2 Enterprise authentication. Te cost of the complex-wide shared Wi-Fi is rolled into rent or condo fees. Casual Internet users may fnd that the shared Wi-Fi is all they ever need, thus cutting revenue potential. On the other hand, heavier users would pay more for wired fber connections that could also include a "private" Wi-Fi for convenience in just that unit. If the complex-wide shared Wi-Fi and the "private" Wi-Fi installations are coordinated through a single service provider, interference issues can be dealt with more efectively. In this hybrid model, it would still be advantageous for the landlord or outside provider to pre-wire a few Ethernet jacks in each unit, connecting back to where the "private" fber would terminate. Te power users and the video streamers will always be happier with wired connections for their desktop computers, Apple TV's, X-Boxes and other video streaming devices. Left: Michael K. Smeltzer Former Director of Community Projects UC2B (Illinois) BBC_SummitPromo_Feb14.indd 35 2/12/14 5:51 PM

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