Has anyone included internet service, and how did you do it?

Question

I'm curious if it can be attractive to offer cheaper broadband than individuals can get by getting a higher bandwidth line for my 6 family. Does anyone know about the economics of this, and technicalities of privacy? I'd probably run cat5 to each unit and then they could hook up their own wifi, rather than try and wifi the whole place. So I'd need a secure 6 port router at least.

This is self interest also, it costs $70 for just broadband from Comcast or Verizon here. I figure adequate bandwidth could be had for far less than $420 /month!

Roy N. · Answer

@Johann Jells

We offer complimentary Internet to our tenants in all our student properties.  We use a fraction of the bandwidth for our building monitoring and make the rest available to the tenants.

When we undertake a substantial renovation of a unit, we will wire it with CAT5/6 to its own internal patch block.  All units are connected back to the mechanical/electrical room (mostly with copper, but we used glass in our last building) where both our equipment and fibre endpoint from the ISP are located.   The routers we use are capable of both layer 2 & 3 segregation and we provide each unit with its own isolated network segment.

802.11 (WiFi) becomes problematic as the size of the building grows:  if you have 6-tenants, each with their own personal WiFi network the interference is tolerable, but once you scale to a 20+ units the tenants access points will be fighting with each other and there will be a lot of RF noise. We are planning the retrofit of a larger complex and I am contemplating providing WiFi coverage (with a separate (virtual) SSID per unit) throughout the buildings to cut down on the interference ... it would also allow a tenant to stay connected to their own network even if they were in the laundry.

Johann Jells · Answer

Thanks all. Roy, you went right over my head with "The routers we use are capable of both layer 2 & 3 segregation and we provide each unit with its own isolated network segment." Can you point me to a primer on this kind of setup? I build my PCs and handle my own home networking, but haven't dealt with this.

My building already has FIOS fiber coming in. I was figuring just getting a residential 150 or 300 mbps account, and routing it to the 6 units via cat5. My current service is 25mbps and I find it fine for streaming. The 150 might do, and I could upgrade if it's a problem. Are there legal issues with doing this, rather than getting a commercial account from those thieves at Verizon?

What about when a tenant wants cable TV? Do you discount back the "internet fee" or just tell them they're paying for it whether they use it or not.

And those vandals masquerading as cable technicians drive me nuts. Drilling through my brick buildings and stringing wire all over like scene out of "Brazil". I've put in my leases that any wiring changes must be submitted with a drawn plan or they'll lose security.

Roy N. · Answer

Economical, but a lot of RF noise ... which one of the things we try to minimize.

Jason Hartley · Answer

An ISP generally wants 20+ units for it to pencil out in my experience.  If it's less than that however they can do a point-to-point wireless directed at your building and then just do smaller wireless antennas for each unit and that's a pretty economical solution that the smaller wireless ISPs will consider.

Roy N. · Answer

@Jason Hartley

What are the cut-offs for your local ISPs?

Around here they are not interested in small multiunits (ie. <16-20) and will try to put individual drops into each unit {drilling trough the side of the building if you are not present to stop them}.

Jason Hartley · Answer

@Johann Jells - Providing high speed internet can be a great feature for a rental.  If you have the ability to run cat5 or cat6 to each unit, that's going to be your best bet.  Then let the tenant plug their own router into that to distribute WIFI to their own devices.  Running a wifi network is a lot more complicated than it seems, so stay away from that.

Depending on the size of your property it may be best to have a local ISP handle the details/billing.  There's a lot of support involved in running an internet service, and trust me, it's not something you want taking away your time from more valuable ventures.  An ISP would just drop a router in there and already have an authentication system built for your type of setup.

Roy N. · Answer

I hear this a lot as a reason not to provide Internet however it is unfounded and untrue.  It is no different than any other utility - are you liable if your tenants misuse the water or electricity (i.e. grow op, unlicensed home brewer, etc)?  The answer is No (provided you do not knowingly encourage or facilitate the behaviour).

All of our tenants sign an acceptable use agreement - not that different than what you would find in a business or other such organisation - along with their lease.  In the agreement, the tenants are informed and agree that we will share network usage logs with the authorities if requested.

Phil Walter · Answer

Is there a risk of you being held liable for your tenants illegally file sharing?

Has anyone included internet service, and how did you do it?

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