Have you investigated the possibility of gap funding a BT/OR installation of fibre? There may be an up front cost for all properties, however, monthly costs will be lower and no additional equipment for the management company to procure and maintain.

I run a community network and we have 12 users each limited to a 10Mb down, 2 Mb up which provides a step change improvement over the 7.5km long land lines where the best was around 2Mb down and worst would drop in and out of sync at 0.25 Mb. Users cant do 4k streaming on the connection but HD is no problem. We see traffic peaks at 50Mb for very brief periods but typically it runs at around 30 Mb.

When I initially set things up I would have sworn I would have required much more bandwidth. In my opinion, a dedicated bandwidth of 100Mb for 8 users will be more than adequate for several years yet.

To put things into comparison my office has 150Mbps leased line down and up, we have 300 employees, no restrictions on streaming etc. Plenty put youtube playlists on all day and no noticeable issues.

If I run a speedtest I get 140+ Meg most of the time and it always feels super quick.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Fri 12-Jan-18 16:21:18)

I don't know if you have already done this but.

1st step would be to find out just what the householders would like and what they would like to do online. and then find out how much they are prepared to pay.
Don't forget to factor in, if the current residents move out. Would the new residents be prepared to pay the same.
Or you could end up with one big bill to pay yourself.

Nice comparison and useful feedback.
I do think home use is heavily influenced by streaming video these days. That and gamers on services like Steam. In a house of four with two streaming and one gamer I know my daily data usage at home is considerable more than what I consume at work, easily by a factor 10.

Or put another way if there are 2 or 3 gamers who use Steam then at times of things like Steam Sales or big game launches things would get busy

Hi
Thanks for all the input and insight. My sense is that the pipe needs to be at least 200Mbps to cover all 8 houses and to be future proof enough to prevent performance blips. In the future (and before the 36 month leased line contract runs out), 4k/HDR will likely be the standard......a possible, but probably not regular scenario, might be all 8 houses watching streamed World Cup Final live all on 4K and all at the same time (each property will need 20-25Mbps)

100 Mbps could work for now, but with a 36 month contract (and the chances of houses being sold during that period - great point btw), there is no scope for expansion unless we install a 1Gb bearer from the get go, and if I'm doing that, I may as well buy the 200Mbps at the same time as the difference in cost is negligible.

Can anyone point me towards where I can find some information on what sort of switches, cable, modems etc we will need to install the network within the estate?

In reply to a post by craski:

Nice comparison and useful feedback.
I do think home use is heavily influenced by streaming video these days. That and gamers on services like Steam. In a house of four with two streaming and one gamer I know my daily data usage at home is considerable more than what I consume at work, easily by a factor 10.