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Technology for Student Housing

843 views 10 replies 4 participants last post by  JimE 
#1 ·
I rent apartments and houses in a college town. I'm in competition with some large complexes which offer all inclusive rent and do my best to keep up. Free WiFi and free cable are big selling points. I offer WiFi in my properties and it's become a huge pain! People call complaining about problems gaming and slow connections. I'm not a technician so I have no idea how to help them and they have trouble working directly with the provider because it's all under my business.

Any advice?
 
#2 ·
Honestly you should hire a company that deals with setting up wireless access for a deployment like this.

For a single house with one renter it's not a big deal. In this case whatever the ISP has should work fine.

For serving multiple apartments you'd probably want to segment the networks, have multiple access points, and have equipment that can handle the workload of a lot of people connecting.

People are always going to have complaints about wifi for many reasons, not all will be the fault of the equipment. Have a company handling this would at least eliminate you having to troubleshoot.
 
#3 ·
As with most home users, housing, apartments, wifi is not the best solution for networking. It can work quite well, and is most handy for handheld devices or laptops. But it often gets implemented as a workaround for not having to run cable for ethernet connections. And quite often, especially when we are talking about young people, most notably guys and their gaming habits, ethernet is the best solution.

What I'm saying, is if at all possible, provide wired connectivity and wifi. Your tenants will be much happier. Or it will end up like my sons apartment in college with ethernet cable strung along the baseboards from room to room to support all of their gaming needs.
 
#4 ·
I have service in each unit. These are not large scale buildings which is why I don't have good luck with getting a vendor interested in managing a network.

We have network cabling run into the bedrooms and then these connect to the ISP provided modem.

My business partner always assumes that whenever people complain it's slow that they're somehow abusing it (streaming porn or stealing music) but I am starting to wonder if there's a problem.
 
#5 ·
Here's how I select Internet plans for my properties. I base it on the number of tenants I'm renting to.

1-2 -> 7mbps ($40/month)
3-4 -> 12mbps ($60/month)
5 -> 24mbps ($105/month)

Generally I get the most complaints from the larger places.

Today I was at one of the properties and I had two Netflix streams going on laptops and a Skype video call from my phone. The place only had 7mbps Internet and everything worked perfectly! What's different about when they use it?
 
#6 ·
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for a single HD stream. So imagine someone trying to stream HD while another person is downloading a game from a site like Steam or Origin which can saturate your connection if not throttled.

I can't imagine 5 or more people sharing 24Mbps if they were all actively using it for something that required a lot of bandwidth.

That said, I think it's reasonable to expect that tenants should be able to deal with the bandwidth available but maybe expectations are not being set for the tenants and they're expecting unlimited bandwidth. If they know going into it what they're getting it's their own fault for expecting it to work like a 100Mbps connection.
 
#9 ·
The only way to know what's causing the slowness would be to monitor/investigate while it's occurring. Which, as noted above, they are likely just saturating the network.

You could offer a "basic" package, and if they want/need more bandwidth they can pay the difference.
 
#10 ·
I contacted my rep with the phone company. They have something new called metro Ethernet which can be quickly adjusted if a tenant wants it faster. They're putting in equipment which can handle up to 50mbps/50mbps (100mbps/100mbps in the 5 person places).

I'm going to provide 5mbps/5mbps per head as the basic plan and then they can bump that up if they want faster.

10/10mbps -> $50/mo, then it's roughly $8 per 5mbps up from there. All but two of my proprieties have requested additional speed at their expense already!
 
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