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Posted by AES on April 13, 2009, 12:56 am
[This message asks a lot of "Consumer Reports" type questions about a
proposed Comcast bundled installation in my personal residence -- but I
think it's mostly "Telecom" in character (and, any responses might be
useful to others as well).]
My wife & I are currently planning a "Triple Play" (i.e., bundled cable,
Internet & multiple phone line) installation/conversion in a sprawling
4-unit family residence a month or so from now. Any advance words of
wisdom or advice for us about any aspects of this will be appreciated.
[Please pardon lengthy message below; it's partly for me to get some of
the major concerns down for my own education as well.]
Our situation is a mostly one-story 3500 sq ft house on the Stanford
campus that includes an owner's section plus 3 self-contained
studio-type rental units under one roof (the rental units are typically
occupied by grad students or visitors on university fellows programs).
Present connectivity includes Comcast cable TV with 4-way signal
splitting; 5 hardwired phone lines (3 into the rental units, plus
separate "residential" and "home office" lines for the owners); and
AT&T DSL service on one of the owner lines.
The DSL (which has only about 400KB data rate due to excessive
distance from the nearest CO) comes in through an elderly Cayman
router, one of whose 4 Ethernet ports is cabled via Cat 5 to a
centrally positioned Apple Extreme base station. This base station
then provides an in-house WIfI LAN to multiple laptops (mostly Macs)
in all four parts of the house (it does get a bit overloaded at
times). Some other misc Ethernet stuff (printers, etc) is hung off
the other three Ethernet ports of the Cayman.
We're hoping to convert essentially _all_ of this connectivity into
the Comcast bundle, including dumping the DSL service after a testing
and transition period. So, a variety of questions come up:
1) Which of the Comcast-suggested modems should we purchase for the
Comcast Internet service? We're leaning toward a NetGear model -- a
good choice???
2) I assume this modem will then provide both a WiFi LAN throughout
the house, plus some Ethernet ports which can drive the existing Cat 5
cabling that exists through most of the house. This WiFI and the
Ethernet ports will then all form one big Ethernet network -- right?
3) So, should we maybe have the three tenants mostly use the Comcast
WiFI LAN, while we keep the existing Airport Extreme (direct cabled into
the Comcast modem) as a separate password-protected Airport LAN for the
owner's family's Macs?
We're not particularly worried about security vis-a-vis the tenants;
but we also don't normally do any direct file sharing with any of the
tenants' machines either. We might separate things this way partly
for redundancy, partly just to keep our family traffic separate.
Or is there a better way?
4) If we do keep the Airport Extreme in the system, should it be
configured so that it's handing out NAT addresses to the laptops that
talk to it? Or operated in bridge mode, so that the cable modem and the
Airport Extreme LAN are all united into one single Ethernet network?
5) Because of the 4-way splitting of the cable TV signal, we currently
have a powered cable TV amplifier at the point where the current cable
from Comcast enters the house. Will the Internet signals pass through
that amplifier? -- or will they have to be split off and/or bypassed
around it somehow?
6) Part of the overall deal is also supposed to be converting at least
three, maybe four of the existing 5 phone lines over to VOIP, so as
to get substantially reduced cost and and unified billing (might
even drop phone service for the tenants, and let them live with the
individual cell phones they generally come to us with, or with VOIP
they set up on their own).
We have no direct experience of any kind with this Internet phone
technology -- any advice and counsel will be appreciated.
7) Cellphone signal levels are marginal at our location for all the
major carriers, though this is supposed to improve very soon with a new
Distributed Service Antenna going in. But if we were to nonetheless
acquire one of these Internet connected $250 to $300 "femtocell" units
from our family cellphone carrier (Verizon), would this unit also serve
cellphones from other carriers that our tenants might have?
And if so, would using that connectivity incur any kind of special
"roaming" or similar charges, either for us, or for them?
8) Besides all the above, anything else we should be asking ourselves?
Thanks much for any assistance . . .
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