Sharing a Leased line in apartment - Feasable?

I live in Manchester City Centre and we currently we do not have high speed connectivity available in my building. This is unfortunate since there are over 100 apartments then directly next door there is a building with a further 70+ apartments. The best available connection is ADSL down a traditional PSTN line provided by BT.

I am considering the feasibility of taking up a leased line of around 1Gbit from a provider such as Virgin and then splitting this to the residents to provide high speed broadband. I know Manchester is covered by the BDUK scheme which may also help.

I am a Sysadmin and network engineer by trade so as far as the actual technology and deployment is concerned this shouldn't be a massive issue.

1) Does anyone know the laws or requirements of doing this, since in essence I would be becoming an ISP. Any resources surrounding the legalities or things like data retention would be appreciated

2) Can anyone provide me with any general guidance or advice regarding my plans ?

Your main hurdle will the leases and permission from the landlord.

Have you talked to Ask4 and Hyperoptic who both deal with ultrafast broadband in apartments.

Hyperoptic already has a number of places in the City offering their Gigabit service.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Your main hurdle will the leases and permission from the landlord.

Have you talked to Ask4 and Hyperoptic who both deal with ultrafast broadband in apartments.

Hyperoptic already has a number of places in the City offering their Gigabit service.

When you say landlord I assume you mean the building freeholder?

I am waiting on Hyperoptic I did a small leaflet drop of around 30 apartments and got some signup. I should at least try the remainder!

Yeah freeholder, wrong term

The thing that springs to mind for me is what monitoring/logging you may need to do. If a tenant goes to illegal material or shares copyright content then you would need to be able to show that it wasn't you that is responsible and pass on the details of who is (but you also would have to consider privacy law so would need to understand when you have to pass details on and when you shouldn't).

Also, if it goes wrong then what level of support do you provide? Would this be your "job" and therefore need to make a living from it or would people be happy that if something goes wrong and you are away for a fortnight on holiday that they would have to wait for you to get back for it to be fixed?

If you'd rather pay someone, I imagine Hyperoptic are the best bet for a live product. But you will indeed need the blessing of the freeholder. However, with that many flats, there is likely to be a management company of some sort - either one made up of some of the residents, or one engaged by the freeholder.

In enlightened times, the freehold might even be held by a resident's management company!

An alternative with BT is just about becoming possible; they are about to start their work on "FTTB" (fibre to the basement), which would then make use of the existing telephone wires to get service throughout the building - much less disruption to the fabric of the building, so much more acceptable to management companies.

According to some BT Wholesale documents, the FTTB field trials are in the roadmap to start in the Apr-Jun quarter.

I imagine the solution would be VDSL2 for now, with the potential to become G.fast later.

In reply to a post by boxrick:

1) Does anyone know the laws or requirements of doing this, since in essence I would be becoming an ISP. Any resources surrounding the legalities or things like data retention would be appreciated

2) Can anyone provide me with any general guidance or advice regarding my plans ?

I haven't heard of anyone doing this around here, but a lot of places that want to retrofit a solution into apartments do so with FTTB: fibre into the basement, then copper through the building. In places life Korea, the copper part is often cat 5 ethernet, but they might be considering G.hn.

Australia's NBN seems to be planning to re-use the telephone copper for FTTB, alongside vectored VDSL2.

Off the top of my head, I suspect you'll have serious issues with fire regulations - with the need to use the right kind of cable (low smoke), and the need to not leaving any holes between floors that can carry fire or smoke. This would probably make freeholders wary.

However, in the rural space, you can see the people at B4RN who are digging in their own fibre across fields and into homes.

Their concerns about being a perpetual blind-spot to BT means they have set up their own community-owned company (to make sure BT can't take it over), and are doing most of the digging through farmer's fields, with free wayleaves and (nearly) free volunteer labour.

Making it commercially viable requires a lot of take-up, and a lot of community involvement.

Their website and business plans might help you:
http://b4rn.org.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/B4RNorth
http://b4rn.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/B4RN-B...
http://b4rn.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/B4RN-B...

worth speaking to openreach --see FAQ's there are a number of managing agents talking to openrreach.-uses copper wite from Basement to flat --no internal wiring changes and choice of 60+service providers --and no ongoing cost to managing agent /;landlord

Edited by deleted (Wed 01-Apr-15 18:01:43)

We have done this on a few sites, legally the only issues are the wayleave and permissions from the freeholder, distribution between the sites would have a number of options but wireless may be easier and better control with a requirement to log on to the wifi then that would make it easier monitoring who is on what IP and what time so if there is any illegal activity it will be easier to see who had that IP at that time.