Install very high speed internet provider?

When we're not piddling around with poolside clocks, we try to actually improve services for our residents. This is on Tuesday's open meeting agenda.

Small satellite dishes--invisible from the street-- would be installed on the roofs of our two towers at no cost to our HOA. Where the vendor makes money is that residents who want the service would pay $50 per month to the firm in exchange for a speed of 200 MBPS (vs 15 - 30 MBPS from our local providers). The firm has been ranked as CA's fastest internet provider for the past 4 years. Just last month an owner requested the service at our open forums. So all the firm wants from the board is a five-year Right of Entry, which includes wiring paths. Because we have so many contracts here, I feel this Right of Entry agreement looks good.

In a addition, this San Francisco-based firm would provide their service free to our managers and our lobbies' WiFi hotspots.

Our PM is high on this service. Sounds very nice to me. Anyone know about it? Any downsides?

Carol,

I am always skeptical of advertised speeds. My local phone company and my cable provider both advertise that they are the fastest. I have had service with both of them at various times and never had speeds even remotely close to what they advertise. Not that I am disappointed with what I have, it's just that they promise one thing and deliver something far less.

I would ask for a demo before going forward with the satellite. Maybe some references in similar installations. I know of several people who have individual satellite service through a well-known national provider and they uniformly hate it. They find that their speeds are determined by the number of users on the system at the moment. They say they get fairly good speeds in Arizona around midnight to three AM, because the users on the east coast are asleep. But when they start getting up early in the morning the speed starts to slow down. And in spite of the provider's advertising, they do limit the amount of data you can upload or download in a day either by freezing them out completely or just slowing service down even more.

For a time I was living in a small town that had neither cable nor DSL. I tried a cellular-based modem and was disappointed with it and stuck with it only because it was the only game in town (except for the crappy satellite). Then I found a start-up provider with a Motorola-designed wireless system that provided faster speeds and did not require a line-of-sight connection. Kind of like a wide-area WI-FI. While it was slower than a cable modem, it was such a good system that I used it until I moved out of that area.

BTW, there is a free speed test available at http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ I just ran it and my cable service measured download speeds of 12.01 mbps and upload of 12.65mbps. I would want to see that 200 mbps to believe it.

Carol,

It also occurred to me that where you measure the speed may be a factor in what the number is. Is that 200 mbps what someone in their living room will receive at, say, 8PM on Wednesday evening when everyone is online or is that number what will be available right at the dish. This one of the few areas in life where I am not an expert but I think each user connected to the various routers will bring down the speed at the user's end.

I think satellite internet service has a lot of potential that has yet to be tapped. We originally went to satellite TV service 10 years ago when we lived in a location just outside the Tucson city limits where cable was not available. We liked satellite so well that we continued using it when we later moved to the Sacramento area. A few years later we moved back to Phoenix and got suckered into the cable system's bundle of phone, TV, and internet. The cable service was a big disappointment and eventually we went back to our satellite TV (but we kept the cable internet).

I am always amazed at how much more reliable the satellite signal is compared to the hard-wired cable. We normally experience about a half-hour per year when the satellite system fails compared to at least that much per week with cable.

If you've have owners request it, it costs nothing to the association and you don't mind giving them an easement and having their dishes on your roof, then I say what does it hurt? As long as residents understand you are just providing access to the service and aren't responsible for the performance then it would be fine, I think.

Great minds think alike!