New Space Question

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

220 S. Phillips Ave.

Sioux Falls, SD 57104

fb.com/workmeso

@workmeso

www.WorkMeso.com

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

···

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

···

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

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Another vote for Airport Extremes here. We just added two more for additional coverage, but they’re the most rock solid wireless access points we’ve tried (and we tried just about every consumer wireless router on the market).

We back it up with hard lines as well, and coverage is great.

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

···

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

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I’ll third the Airport Extremes.

Right now we have one in the middle of the space, but will likely move to two (one at each end) for better coverage as we get more people and the space gets more fleshed out.

Pipe wise, we went with comcast biz internet, and did the 40mb down. But with a phone call can be 100mb if we need it. We wanted to start with what we thought our first few members needed and save a bit of money, but can grow as needed, vs. have crazy fat pipe and no one using it to it’s fullest and throwing money away.

if that helps.

John Wilker

Founder, 360|Conferences

twitter: jwilker

johnwilker.com | Ignite Denver| Denwhere | 360|Flex | 360|iDev

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
~ Bruce Lee

···

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:46 AM, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Another vote for Airport Extremes here. We just added two more for additional coverage, but they’re the most rock solid wireless access points we’ve tried (and we tried just about every consumer wireless router on the market).

We back it up with hard lines as well, and coverage is great.

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

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Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

···

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To post to this group, send email to [email protected].

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected].

For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

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Hey Josh,

We are getting ready to run 20-30 Ethernet wires all over the space - really similar to what Pat is talking about. We want to be able to provide the members with a reliable connection, and hard wired is the best for that.

Peace,

Ryan Price

[email protected]

@liberatr

UrbanReThink.com

···

On Aug 26, 2011, at 10:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To post to this group, send email to [email protected].

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected].

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Ryan,

I should note - the space came wired & we went ahead & made 'em hot - but no one uses them. Ever, outside of the one VOIP phone 1 member uses. As mobile as 95% of our members are, nobody carries ethernet cabling with them.

Cheers!

Pat

···

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Ryan Price wrote:

Hey Josh,

We are getting ready to run 20-30 Ethernet wires all over the space - really similar to what Pat is talking about. We want to be able to provide the members with a reliable connection, and hard wired is the best for that.

Peace,

Ryan Price

[email protected]

@liberatr

UrbanReThink.com

We opted to not even bother with ethernet. We might run one to a voip phone for the space. We asked members and looked at who we wanted to attract and being tied to a ethernet cable didn’t make sense. We’re all wireless. The printer will be hung off an Airport Extreme or ethernet next to the airport.

John Wilker

Founder, 360|Conferences

twitter: jwilker

johnwilker.com | Ignite Denver| Denwhere | 360|Flex | 360|iDev

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
~ Bruce Lee

···

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Ryan,

I should note - the space came wired & we went ahead & made 'em hot - but no one uses them. Ever, outside of the one VOIP phone 1 member uses. As mobile as 95% of our members are, nobody carries ethernet cabling with them.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:54 AM, Ryan Price wrote:

Hey Josh,

We are getting ready to run 20-30 Ethernet wires all over the space - really similar to what Pat is talking about. We want to be able to provide the members with a reliable connection, and hard wired is the best for that.

Peace,

Ryan Price

[email protected]

@liberatr

UrbanReThink.com

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To post to this group, send email to [email protected].

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Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I’d have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP’s and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme’s simply couldn’t handle the load for about 40 simultaneous “devices.” Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme’s, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme’s would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE’s might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people…

Also, AE’s don’t allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone’s watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we’d need 20/20 or more!

Jerome

···

BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

Ah! SO sorry, I made a huge mistake and left out an important part: we use the Airport Extremes for wireless ONLY. They’re dumb wifi repeaters.

We use the DLink DIR-655 for assigning and managing IPs, traffic shaping, etc. It runs like a champ with all of our traffic. Hasn’t had to be rebooted in months. The D-LINK’s wifi kinda sucked though, so we shut that off.

http://www.dlink.com/DIR-655

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

···

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Jerome Chang [email protected] wrote:

Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I’d have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP’s and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme’s simply couldn’t handle the load for about 40 simultaneous “devices.” Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme’s, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme’s would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE’s might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people…

Also, AE’s don’t allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone’s watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we’d need 20/20 or more!

Jerome


BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036

ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

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We have Comcast business class 50mbps/10 up/down and can have 35
people on our wifi router which I think is a Netgear-N I picked up at
Bestbuy. The router also handles two different networks. One for
people with older computers and one for newer computers (B/G vs A/N).
Mixing the two was a nightmare and all the new computers were dragged
down to the old computer's speed capability which is why we split them
up.

We also have 4 hardwired ports. One member went to Home Depot and
custom made 4 short cables for $7 that we keep on a shelf if someone
wants to grab one and another member donated 4 10/100 ethernet
switches which we haven't used but probably will in the new space. All
this magic costs us $199/month.

As for reliability, the only time we had issues is when they were
relocating the utilities in our back alley and every time a truck
backed over the cable they were burying we lost internet. That was a
stabby 3 days for all of us.

Angel

···

On Aug 25, 9:09 am, Josh Aberson <[email protected]> wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I'll just cut right to it.

I'm opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I'm not too sure about is internet. We've got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space's size and amount of people. It's a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I'm currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson
i....@workmeso.com
m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

220 S. Phillips Ave.
Sioux Falls, SD 57104
fb.com/workmeso
@workmesowww.WorkMeso.com

up to a certain level, the consumer and “prosumer” solutions being proposed here are perfectly cool. Above that level, it needs to get serious.

Astaro is a great provider of enterprise grade WAP’s that just work. They also sponsor the Bsides security conferences that are free, and awesome! (I help run one, and present at several others.)

Just an FYI.

Joshua

···

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Angel Kwiatkowski [email protected] wrote:

We have Comcast business class 50mbps/10 up/down and can have 35

people on our wifi router which I think is a Netgear-N I picked up at

Bestbuy. The router also handles two different networks. One for

people with older computers and one for newer computers (B/G vs A/N).

Mixing the two was a nightmare and all the new computers were dragged

down to the old computer’s speed capability which is why we split them

up.

We also have 4 hardwired ports. One member went to Home Depot and

custom made 4 short cables for $7 that we keep on a shelf if someone

wants to grab one and another member donated 4 10/100 ethernet

switches which we haven’t used but probably will in the new space. All

this magic costs us $199/month.

As for reliability, the only time we had issues is when they were

relocating the utilities in our back alley and every time a truck

backed over the cable they were burying we lost internet. That was a

stabby 3 days for all of us.

Angel

On Aug 25, 9:09 am, Josh Aberson [email protected] wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]
m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

220 S. Phillips Ave.

Sioux Falls, SD 57104

fb.com/workmeso

@workmesowww.WorkMeso.com

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

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We can chat more offline, but, I am really happy with the Netgear router we use at home (it has two channels) and is rock solid. I have a Linksys here in AltamontCowork which has been great too (but in the past my Linksys routers had a tendency to go bonkers occasionally requiring a swift kick in the reboot).

I have Comcast Business Internet since I do video conferencing testing and needed upstream BW as well as downstream. It has served us VERY well. Just did a quick speed test, via WiFi: 18 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up. The BW’s you are looking at are awesome! South Dakota? Hmmm… :slight_smile:

Locate the router, if you can as close to the middle as possible. 150 feet should be easy since the spec says 300 feet (or it used to when I followed that kind of techy stuff).

Mike

···

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Josh Aberson [email protected] wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

220 S. Phillips Ave.

Sioux Falls, SD 57104

fb.com/workmeso

@workmeso

www.WorkMeso.com

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To post to this group, send email to [email protected].

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"Donate $1.00 to the Carol Phan “Dollars for Scholars” College Scholarship Fund and help us help a Tracy, CA student go to college. http://forcarol.wordpress.com/carol-phan-scholarship-fund/

Mike Pihlman

AltamontCowork / ForCarol.com, Inc.

95 W. 11th Street, Suite 205

Tracy, CA 95376

Phone: 209-757-8862

Web: http://AltamontCowork.com

Twitter: @AltamontCowork

Facebook: http://Facebook.com/AltamontCowork

Drive Safe! Never Forget http://ForCarol.com

Picking up on a super-old thread, I’m wondering if Jerome or anyone else can weigh in on Meraki, Ruckus, or any other similar wireless solutions that they’re using and love? Pros, cons, configurations, number of members/devices you support per Access Point, etc?

We’re looking at options again now that we’re expanding to 2 floors and determining efficient ways to cover 8000 square feet on 2 floors of a cement-structure building. Adding more Airport Extremes is an option, but stuff like “beamforming” and high-power antennae has my attention :slight_smile:

-Alex

···

On Friday, August 26, 2011 12:15:02 PM UTC-4, Jerome wrote:

Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I’d have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP’s and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme’s simply couldn’t handle the load for about 40 simultaneous “devices.” Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme’s, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme’s would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE’s might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people…

Also, AE’s don’t allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone’s watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we’d need 20/20 or more!

Jerome


BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

Hi.

We and NextSpace both use Meraki. I believe Link does as well. Many pros, and the only cons I encountered was the upfront cost a year ago, which since have lowered. Otherwise, operationally, it’s been bliss. Totally ideal for dynamically changing spaces such as coworking.

Jerome

···

BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036

On May 7, 2012, at 10:27 AM, Alex Hillman wrote:

Picking up on a super-old thread, I’m wondering if Jerome or anyone else can weigh in on Meraki, Ruckus, or any other similar wireless solutions that they’re using and love? Pros, cons, configurations, number of members/devices you support per Access Point, etc?

We’re looking at options again now that we’re expanding to 2 floors and determining efficient ways to cover 8000 square feet on 2 floors of a cement-structure building. Adding more Airport Extremes is an option, but stuff like “beamforming” and high-power antennae has my attention :slight_smile:

-Alex

indyhall.org

On Friday, August 26, 2011 12:15:02 PM UTC-4, Jerome wrote:

Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I’d have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP’s and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme’s simply couldn’t handle the load for about 40 simultaneous “devices.” Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme’s, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme’s would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE’s might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people…

Also, AE’s don’t allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone’s watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we’d need 20/20 or more!

Jerome


BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

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Sweet, thanks Jerome.

How many access points do you use to cover your location(s)? Any recommendations for planning coverage?

···

/ah

coworking in philadelphia

On Monday, May 7, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Jerome Chang wrote:

Hi.

We and NextSpace both use Meraki. I believe Link does as well. Many pros, and the only cons I encountered was the upfront cost a year ago, which since have lowered. Otherwise, operationally, it’s been bliss. Totally ideal for dynamically changing spaces such as coworking.

Jerome


BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036

On May 7, 2012, at 10:27 AM, Alex Hillman wrote:

Picking up on a super-old thread, I’m wondering if Jerome or anyone else can weigh in on Meraki, Ruckus, or any other similar wireless solutions that they’re using and love? Pros, cons, configurations, number of members/devices you support per Access Point, etc?

We’re looking at options again now that we’re expanding to 2 floors and determining efficient ways to cover 8000 square feet on 2 floors of a cement-structure building. Adding more Airport Extremes is an option, but stuff like “beamforming” and high-power antennae has my attention :slight_smile:

-Alex

indyhall.org

On Friday, August 26, 2011 12:15:02 PM UTC-4, Jerome wrote:

Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I’d have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP’s and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme’s simply couldn’t handle the load for about 40 simultaneous “devices.” Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme’s, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme’s would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE’s might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people…

Also, AE’s don’t allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone’s watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we’d need 20/20 or more!

Jerome


BLANKSPACES
“work FOR yourself, not BY yourself”

www.blankspaces.com
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven’t seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there’s no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don’t even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it’s convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D’oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it’s a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn’t have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey [email protected] wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We’ve always gone with a “reasonable” uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member’s VOIP phone.

I’ve been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what’s the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We’re at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I’ll just cut right to it.

I’m opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I’m not too sure about is internet. We’ve got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space’s size and amount of people. It’s a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I’m currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson

[email protected]

m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

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For 7500sf, we have 3, but partially because we have a heavy-usage event space up front, so 2 of the AP's kind of double-up coverage.
For 5000sf, we have 2.

I would recommend discussing details w/ Chris and Josh, cc-ed here. They have worked w/ me for nearly 4 years so they've seen us go thru 3 gens of wi-fi gear.

Jerome

···

______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036

On May 7, 2012, at 10:42 AM, Alex Hillman wrote:

Sweet, thanks Jerome.

How many access points do you use to cover your location(s)? Any recommendations for planning coverage?

--
/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Monday, May 7, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Jerome Chang wrote:

Hi.

We and NextSpace both use Meraki. I believe Link does as well. Many pros, and the only cons I encountered was the upfront cost a year ago, which since have lowered. Otherwise, operationally, it's been bliss. Totally ideal for dynamically changing spaces such as coworking.

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com (http://www.blankspaces.com)
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036

On May 7, 2012, at 10:27 AM, Alex Hillman wrote:

Picking up on a super-old thread, I'm wondering if Jerome or anyone else can weigh in on Meraki, Ruckus, or any other similar wireless solutions that they're using and love? Pros, cons, configurations, number of members/devices you support per Access Point, etc?

We're looking at options again now that we're expanding to 2 floors and determining efficient ways to cover 8000 square feet on 2 floors of a cement-structure building. Adding more Airport Extremes is an option, but stuff like "beamforming" and high-power antennae has my attention :slight_smile:

-Alex

indyhall.org (http://indyhall.org)

On Friday, August 26, 2011 12:15:02 PM UTC-4, Jerome wrote:

Hi all.

Sorry folks, but I'd have to disagree. I tried to use an Airport Extreme, then added another and we quickly overwhelmed them. We upgraded to a DLink commercial grade router and within a year (or less!), that fizzled. We now use Meraki AP's and router (since March 2011) and so far so good. Basically, the Apple Extreme's simply couldn't handle the load for about 40 simultaneous "devices." Remember that many people now use 2-3 devices (laptop + phone/tablet), so you should anticipate x2.

For the Apple Extreme's, we ended up having to often turn off and on sometimes 1-2/day. The reason was that these Apple Extreme's would not flush out IP addresses. We concluded that in an environment where you might have the same 40 people, these AE's might be appropriate. But when we host an event for 50 people...

Also, AE's don't allow you to manage the user connections: no throttling, no activity per IP address, etc. In an age of dropbox and all things cloud, all it takes is one uneducated user to think they can upload a 1 gb movie file to ruin the bandwidth for everyone else. Or say, when video streaming and other heavy bandwidth usage peaks around lunch time because everyone's watching NetFlix streaming while they take a break.

Finally, how is everyone getting these fat 40mb pipes??? We pay $600/mo for a 5/5 EoC, and $900/mo for 10/10. And some $200/mo I think for 10/2 DSL (SLA, not consumer). I can only speculate a 50/10 or something must be $$. Oh, and we need the synchronous 5/5 or 10/10 for our VoIP handsets. We use QoS to prioritize the phone data packets; otherwise, we'd need 20/20 or more!

Jerome
______________
BLANKSPACES
"work FOR yourself, not BY yourself"

www.blankspaces.com (http://www.blankspaces.com/\)
ph: 323.330.9505 | 5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea) Los Angeles, CA 90036
ph: 310.526.2255 | 1450 2nd Street (@ Broadway), Santa Monica, CA 90401

On Aug 26, 2011, at 7:53 AM, Pat Ramsey wrote:

Josh,

Never had any issues with the firewall. I eyeball the logs every so often & haven't seen anything odd.

The primary base station works great as a central router - no DHCP issues, NAT works great, DNS etc. Very low-key & stable, as it should be.

On the wireless side of things, there's no way we would be able to satisfactorily handle more than 15 or so people on 1 wireless router. Don't even try it. So I bought two (plus, it made the little red light in the back of my head slow down. 2 is 1, 1 is none, etc) of the Extremes.

We segmented out our cloud into three, in order to provide connection points for the different speeds without causing a slowdown for faster devices. Each uses the same wireless key, so it's convenient for users to get on. My original plan of 1 cloud for all failed spectacularly the day we had a visitor with an old 802.11b card connect, killing connection speeds for everyone. D'oh!

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:38 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Thanks Pat, appreciate the help.

I was looking into the Airport extreme option. I really like that it has USB connectivity for shared drives, and that it's a dual antenna so can separate out networks for different uses. Am mainly concerned with firewall protection on the main line coming in.

Have you ever had any issues with the firewall on those? Also, if you didn't have two, do you think your 45 members would bog it down?

Thanks again!

Josh Aberson

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 26, 2011, at 9:24 AM, Pat Ramsey <ramse...@gmail.com (mailto:ramse...@gmail.com)> wrote:

Josh,

Congratulations, first off. Welcome to the fun!

What are the connectivity needs of your users? Are they pushing large amounts of code & files daily? Are you serving data from your end?

We've always gone with a "reasonable" uplink. Business DSL for a long time, then a cable line in addition, eventually adding fiber for data & keeping a dsl for 1 member's VOIP phone.

I've been in IT long enough to know you can never have a large enough pipe, so set the expectations early, find out what's the right size without busting your budget & work with your members - know them well enough - to avoid any hurt feelings, problems, etc.

We're at around 40-ish members now. Our data line is fiber, 5 up / 5 down, I think it is. Our core router is an Airport Extreme base station. Off that is a 24-port gigabit switch, as the space came with some wired data ports. We run another Airport Extreme to extend the cloud in the main room. Extended off that is a Linksys & a D-link wireless router (both flashed with dd-wrt). Each of these has a old network printer attached to it.

Easy-peasy, pretty much runs itself.

Cheers!

Pat

On Aug 25, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Josh Aberson wrote:

Hey all,

Without getting into too much introduction and details, I'll just cut right to it.

I'm opening a space next week in South Dakota. Working on finalizing details right now, and one thing I'm not too sure about is internet. We've got 20 members or so pre-signed to move in day 1 and in trying to plan for the future, am trying to figure out what sort of internet speed I need, and what sort of router to handle the space's size and amount of people. It's a long space, about 150ft, and we could very easily have 100 people accessing the network at any given time.

Any of the larger spaces out there have insight? I'm currently looking at an internet speed of 50 down/10up or 100 down/15 up. Also am looking at 801.11n routers that have two to three adjustable networks built into the device.

Would love some thoughts.

Best,

Josh Aberson
in...@workmeso.com (mailto:in...@workmeso.com)
m: 521.6158 | @JoshAberson

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Chris has been VERY helpful off list. Thank you for the recommendation!

-Alex

···


/ah

coworking in philadelphia

On Monday, May 7, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Jerome Chang wrote:

The content of the message has not been downloaded yet.

Hey guys, greeetings from Buenos Aires. I’d been evaluating a Meraki solution after spending some time @ Blankspaces. The only thing that was
holding me back were cost concerns and an undefined networked solution as Meraki was going to solve the wifi part of the puzzle (access control, open-mesh, QoS).

We recently hosted an event for a group called Hacks/Hackers and they installed a tremendously simple set of small AP’s (http://www.open-mesh.com) that created an instant mesh-network which were ccontrolled by the open-source CloudTrax http://www.open-mesh.com/index.php/cloud-controller). Worked like a charm for the 100+ attendees.

I’m now thinking of going this route as the functionality seems to be comparable to Meraki but at 10% the cost.

Anyone have any experience with this Open-Mesh AP’s + Cloudtrax (cloud controller) combo solution?

I’m looking to update the 6 consumer AP’s I have distributed around my 5,500sq ft. 2 floor space with aprox 70 members. I’m also looking to setup VLANS for each member’s team (we have about 60%+ of our members in
private offices. Not sure yet how we might integrate the wifi mesh network with the wired VLAN’s. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

···

On Monday, May 7, 2012 10:28:15 PM UTC-3, Alex Hillman wrote:

Chris has been VERY helpful off list. Thank you for the recommendation!

-Alex


/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Monday, May 7, 2012 at 8:15 PM, Jerome Chang wrote:

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