Networking Solution...?

AxeluteZero

Beta member
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3
Have I got one for you...

Here's the deal. I've got one large house with 16 bedrooms. Two people are sharing one of those bedrooms, so I've got 17 users split between three floors (two in the basement, 8 on the second floor and 7 on the first floor).

Somehow, I need to provide internet to all 17 of them. I would like to know if my setup will support my users well. Let me know if you have questions/comments.

Since the building is technically two apartments, I will be purchasing two 60 Mbps lines, one for each floor, and split them between 8/9 users, with a router on each end of the building. So it will be something like this:


Router (60 Mbps, 8 users) ------------------------------- Router (60 Mbps, 9 users)

I will probably use AirPort Extremes for the routers. The major flaw I find in this is (besides the low Mbps/user) that the 60 Mbps lines are capped at 500 GB of data/month. All of these users are college students (including myself) and so we may easily exceed that cap.

Opinions? Comments? Ideas about the router placement or setup? I'd like anything... thank you for your input!
 
Welcome to CF!

A few thoughts.

Good choice in wireless routers, although I'm not an Apple fan personally, they make great products and everything I've seen about the Airport Extreme has been positive.

With the setup, you should have no trouble connecting all the users. Although, considering your Router placement, I would make a small adjustment.


|------x------------------------x------|


Put the routers as shown above, so you get the maximum effective reach and possibly some overlap. Having them at the far ends of the house (depending on how large) may leave a gap in coverage.

With a 500GB data cap, you're looking at 55 +/- GB per user, per month. That's plenty as it's 1.8GB per day! But hey, uncle torrence could probably eat that up in a heartbeat.
 
Oh yeah, thanks for the suggestion on router placement. That would make more sense.

55 GB/user/month for 9 and slighter higher for 8, right. I'm worried about the bandwidth per computer as well though. With a 60 Mbps connection, each user has roughly 6.5 Mbps to his/herself. Is that acceptable speed-wise? I'm currently running four users on a 6 Mbps line and that's generally pretty snappy, but I just wanted to double check.
 
You should have no trouble with a 60mbps line... Just remember that with downloading, it tends to consume the maximum available bandwidth, so if you download a torrent, per say, that's really going to eat into the bandwidth. If each user is torrenting, then they'll want to set their global max download speed to somewhere around 500k. Browsing normally won't be an issue.
 
Okay. I think this sounds good for now then.

Thanks for the responses! I'll try to stick around and see if I can help anyone. :)
 
I'd make a low-power router/server, running PFSense. This will let you load balance the two DSL lines. You could install Squid on the box, so as to cache web images/files etc - this should help with the bandwidth consumption. You could probably do some Traffic Shaping with PFSense, too. You might be able to make the speed more severely limited if your monthly (combined) bandwidth usage exceeds 800GB or something like that.

I don't think that something like an Airport is quite suitable for a network on this scale. I would use a switch combined with your server, and combine it with a couple of these: Linksys WAP610N Wireless-N Access Point with Dual-Band: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
 
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