Wifi for townhouse complex or apartment complex

Hi everyone, I'm in urgent need of some good info regarding WiFi internet for body corp....

:(:( (This is for a good friend of mine.) He's Columbian and doesn't know much about internet and isn't very tech savy.

He manages a town house complex, just wondering Q.1. now days... what is the requirement for townhouses to provide wifi internet to owners and tenants inside the complex? Is there legislative requirement? or is it something that's meant to add value?

Q2. if it's required, or you want to install it: how do you go about doing it? Do you need it so it covers the whole complex? or just the BBQ, tennis court and pool areas? is it up to the owners to decide? I can't imagine you would want to blanket the whole complex.

Q3. what happens if one Ahole hogs the whole bandwidth or torrents and uses up all the quota? Does body corp get stuck with a massive bill? What plan are you on? How do you manage internet hoggers?

Q4. what happens if someone downloads something illegally like copyright movies and tv shows? ISIS training videos? child porn? etc?

Q5 Is pay to use internet a good option? like in hotels first 30mins free or 100mb free. What are your outcomes? any good? better than a plan that everyone shares the same quota (tragedy of the commons)?

Q6. In this day and age people have 3g 4g on their mobile devices, and everyone has internet. which dumbass came up with the idea of needing to have wifi to share? It only takes one device to open one of those apps that continually uploads (p2p or uploading to cloud) to hog all the bandwidth so no one else can get on.

Please share your experience with Wifi and what the end result was. and what provider and plan you choose in the end or you wish you choose.

Thanks in advance.
 
There is no requirement for Apartment/Townhouse complexes to provide Wifi for owners and tenants. Hence, if they did for some reason provide wifi then there would be no requirements about coverage.

Unless I had someone with appropriate skills managing it, I would definitely not be in favour of providing Wifi for some of the reasons you mentioned.
 
This is quite possible, I've setup and managed similar systems in a hospital.

However, there's no need or expectation to provide it to apartments so i wouldn't bother. Financially, I doubt you'd ever recoup the costs, either.
 
Can someone who has implemented something similar please share your experience. Don't be shy.

Was it money well spent? or everyone hated it? Just another drain? :(
 
I know of at least one small managed complex which did this. A bunch of students downloaded the months quota in one night.

The manager now uses a pay as you go system, if you want an hour you pay for it. It is a pain for short term holiday makers to have to keep digging into their pockets to pay for extras.

A lot of councils use a system capped at 200mb per user per day. Small but effective.
 
Last edited:
Can someone who has implemented something similar please share your experience. Don't be shy.

Was it money well spent? or everyone hated it? Just another drain? :(

Haven't done this myself, but I know a building owner who has contracted out wifi access right across the building to an outside company who installed access points and manages access control, authentication and accounting. Residents who want the service deal directly with the outside company. For many, it is welcome because it means they don't need to have any phone line.
 
Last edited:
Haven't done this myself, but I know a building owner who has contracted out wifi access right across the building to an outside company who installed access points and manages access control, authentication and accounting. Residents who want the service deal directly with the outside company. For many, it is welcome because it means they don't need to have any phone line.

Ah, having phone line or cable is an important consideration. I hadn't thought of that.

As others have said, problem is that it's easy to chew through huge amounts of data very quickly, without warning. (iOS and OS X updates, I'm looking at you.)

I'd be staying away from including unrestricted or unmetered data to anybody, unless your data plan itself is unlimited.
 
Back
Top