How are communication networks laid in the apartment ?

In all of phase 3 communication Service providers install their network equipment in control rooms (could be inside the facility or shared with neighboring gated communities), communication shafts and on customer premises. The network cabling inside the campus is routed using cable trays that are mounted on the basement roof (and reaches each of the 30 blocks from control room). and to each floor through the communication shaft. This path has no hindrances or obstacles or constraints. It can support lot of service provider independent networks giving giving enough opportunity to prevent monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies. However the path from shaft to flat is not so receptive to accommodate multiple player networks and facilitate a wide range of choice for the apartment/dwelling/home/subscriber as a single thin conduit (without any intermediary junction boxes) carries the cabling from shaft to each apartment unit.

How do the conduit constraints impact a resident ?

Infrastructure position/Blues
Each flat in T4+ (new towers) has 2 conduits running from shaft to each flat. a 19mm reserved for both data and voice services, typically terminating in living room wall opposite to TV wall and separate 25mm one reserved for TV typically terminating in TV wall of living room. In T3 (daffodils), their is only ONE 19mm conduit which is supposed to carry all three (voice, data and TV) cabling.

Service Provider operational behaviors

Now service providers typically run network right to the flat and their cable has to pass through this conduit. In particular, they:

1. DO NOT share the cables with other ISPs 
2. LAY cables from shaft to flat  ONLY when they get a new connection request from dwelling and frequently/usually PULL IT OUT if subscriber disconnects
3. Will PULL OUT unused cables to make way for their cable as the conduit is thin (Also it makes roll back to old SP more painful).
4. The DO NOT enclose the drop cables from junction box to the flat conduit entry point consistently in rodent safe flex conduits

This is how usually field staff of Service providers work. They care about about their company, then the resident's or apartment's long term interest.

Impact on residents

1. During an apartment lifetime, its residents can change or the resident can change his service provider (For eg, migrate Broadband from Pursuit to Airtel/ACT or Airtel to ACT and vice versa) for voice or data multiple times or can add new service providers for new services (2nd Broadband connection for example).  A single cable cannot be independently-inserted or removed. The entire set has to be removed, modified (cables added or removed) or relaid. In this process it s possible that fiber, cat6 UTP or telephone cables can be damaged, causing a vicious repair cycle of unrelated communication cables.  In particular the RG6 cable TV wire ( more hardness due to thick and robust insulation) being put together with fiber optic, cat6 and telephone cables in common conduit increases this damage possibility multiple times.  The damages can be caused by excessive pulling strength used, abrasion from blockages in conduit (cement/grime), GI metal wire (used for pulling), bends, etc. Once a cable gets damaged the resident needs to pay Rs. 500/- to Rs 750/- labor charges + cost of new cable to repair the damage.
2. Another problem is sometimes apartment users need two internet connection to work around downtime (critical for work from home) due to construction activities in neighbourhood (our neighbourhood is still a heavy construction zone) on which we have no control. But by default all cabling a service provider does is to support ONLY HIS services. And hence resident is forced to re-cable again to support the 2nd service provider and expose himself to all risks in Point(1) above.
3. APR (like any other apartment complex) has a rodent problem. Rodents will frequently bite through exposed cables. The Drop cabling from SP junction box in shaft to conduit opening of flat is frequently run without a conduit leaving it prone to rat bites. And every time that happens you see same financial implications, long repair time and damage of your or other flat cables during re-cabling (if splicing cannot be done).

Mitigation options available to residents

If a resident wants to side step above risk(s), currently the best available option is to take all your service from one ISP, and upfront, and stick to it whether you like them or not or even if better choices emerge down the line. If you think you need second ISP stick to mobile broadband which may not work in most flats or take the 2nd connection much ahead of need. This pull for reducing service spread and sticking to one provider is an indirect way of pushing the environment towards a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly of early entrants in Telecom services and is not possible to constrain when residents change for the flat (like tenants or from owner to tenant or tenant to owner).  This is a first direct conflict between the interests of few service providers and residents. 

For TV the drop cable from shaft to flat is provided by the builder and has a junction point in shaft and therefore its is not modified and of a lesser concern.

The rodent problem is a matter of cabling discipline but has to be separately enforced by each and every individual independently with each SP whose services you use.

Are their any dependencies between cabling between flats ?

If you read the above blog posts, you might come to the logical path that cable path is different to each apartment and therefore no dependencies. However this is not entirely true. Lets look at how the conduits are terminating in the shaft:

For a given floor something like above illustration is what a service provider field staff sees when trying to give a service to any apartment. A cluster of conduit ends. Assume that all flats in a particular floor are occupied (it will be the case with all floors a year or two down the line).

The SP field staff is faced with an question that "which conduit goes to the flat" which he is interested to connect or disconnect or simply "which conduit belongs to which flat". Their is no standard way these ends are organized.

The way this is currently resolved is that each of these conduits have a metal wire (GI wire) which they tug with a little force and observe if the cable in the apartment of interest moves a bit. If it does not, tug the next one till you get a tug to move the flat's wires. This is a hit and trial method. Unfortunately in this hit-and-trial tugging method, cables/terminations of the neighboring flat can be accidentally damaged. 

Symptoms

My neighbor changed his internet ISP (or added a new one) or a new resident moved in my floor and I lost my internet connection for no fault if mine. I can neither penalize my neighbor or ISP staff and have to bear perhaps a day of outage, pay some contract labor Rs. 500/- to Rs. 750/- for fixing this and pay additional cost in some cases for new cable. This can randomly happen anytime during your residency in the apartment (consider your lucky if you do not face this). 

So how do we resolve these issues ?

If you think short-sighted, then the first reaction might be that  it will settle down in 2-3 year or no need to fix as it happens in every apartment complex. Think long-term and we need a solution for this.

Technically this is a structured cabling fault. And it can be fixed by:

1. Introducing structured cabling element known as "Wall Mount LIU/Patch Panel" between conduit and SP Floor Distribution boxes
2. Upfront deciding on the safe number (and commonly used types) of drop cables required for voice, data and video and laying them together, even if not all are used
3. Terminating the Cables in shaft side at the Patch Panel and on the flat side in a wall outlet, basically sealing the drop cables for Life. 
4. Any cable run from shaft to Patch panel can be enclosed in rodent safe conduit for additional protection. Ditto for cables running from Patch panel to SP floor distribution box.

Box, Cable, Conduit and Plate (BCCP). Easy to remember. Refer the illustration below:

Now whenever a new service provider is required, he just patch into the flat's termination  in patch panel and plug his  CPE (ONT, modem, router, phone) into the wall outlet on the flat side and we are good to go. Their is no tampering with cables and therefore:

• No chance of damage to cables of a flat during its lifetime by SP addition, removal, upgrade etc during the lifetime as they are not operated after being laid (unless damaged by natural degradation in decades or some calamity)
• No chance of a neighbour in your floor doing the above and accidentally impacting your flat's services (his conduit is also not operated)
• Big Improvement in efficiency of SP field staff when they have to provide new connections or remove connections
• No stickiness factor for any resident with any Service provider (real freedom of choice)
• Entry of new players eased as their is no bottleneck to bring their networks if required (i.e. not agreeing to use apartment level Pursuit FTTH network and residents insisting to have their service option) to each dwelling
• You can take the 2nd internet connection as and when you please (only requirement is one SP one cable)

The GI wire gets used now only in some freak case of repair required for cables. Also we expect each flat in a floor follow integration with patch panel, so that we do not inconvenience our neighbours in any way.

Basically, Death to monopoly, duopoly and any oligopoly !!! And the power of "freedom to choose" back in the hands of the residents where it originally belongs. In essence what patch panel solution is doing is making the entire process of changing or taking new connections a plug and play affair for both the resident as well as the service provider.

How many cables are required in the conduit between apartment and shaft ?

Globally communication services are delivered to homes using:

• Untwisted Telephone cable (1-pair)
• Twisted Pair Ethernet cable (cat5e/6)
• Optical Fiber 
• coaxial cable (widely used for Broadcast television in India)
• Over-the-air or Wireless Networking (Wifi, Cellular)

One fundamental idea of patch panel is to ensure that each cable type support is their for each apartment to accommodate all kinds of SP service distribution architecture from shaft onwards. 

The service to drop cable map in APR Phase 3 condominiums is like this:

1. Intercom - Via telephone cable (1-pair needed) and provided by Pursuit. Fixed and Adarsh will provide 2-pair cable by default (1-pair can be used later for direct landline by BSNL and/or ADSL service)
2. Data (variable)
1. If owner chooses ACT broadband or EDigital/Tata-DoCoMo, then it will come to apartment over  a single Cat 6 UTP
2. If owner chooses Airtel Broadband, then it will come to apartment  over 2F optical fiber
3. Video (TV) - Via Coaxial for cable TV, Airtel DTH (MDU) and Tatasky DTH (MDU). 

This is the bare minimum required. Additionally we recommend that owners go for an additional Cat6 cable and additional 2F Optical Fiber [both reserved fir future use (apartment data share in future like CCTV footage share, 2nd Broadband connection for failover/load-balance).

To summarize cable package configuration is:

• Base Cable package (Mandatory for each flat) - 1x2-pair telephone + 1xCat6 UTP + 1x2F OFC
• Addon cables (Optional but Highly Recommended) - 1x cat6 + 1x2F OFC

The addon cables is recommended based on following premise. Topday the only aaprtment owned service is Intercom voice. In future, it may be extended to some data like some CCTV camera footage sharing, campus LAN, Video-on-Demand, etc and may be delivered by Pursuit or association owned network (future possibility). In such a scenario  an Airtel or ACT Broadband subscriber may actually need data service from Pursuit or  apartment association vendor and this may require additional optical fiber or LAN cable. If not their, the flat may need to be re-cabled at extra cost & collateral damage risk to that flat's cables. The addon cabling and termination and labor has to be paid for entirely by owner.  Therefore its a recommendation, not mandatory and owners can use their own discretion to make the decision.

Cable TV or video wires are already provided by Adarsh (1 cable). Owner can add extra one in the separate conduit as addon (but this may not be feasible for T3/Daffodils). 

How do the Patch Panel (LIU) look like ?

These are currently in co-design stage with a local structured cabling equipment manufacturer. Once prototypes will be ready, we will be happy to share pictures as well as show physical samples of the same.

In the interim, here is a drawing and similar box illustrations:

The above box houses only optical fiber couplers, cables and terminations, but the Patch panel box designed by our team can house cables, connectors and couplers along with small lengths of rodent safe conduits for all three cable types viz. optical fiber, ethernet and telephone cabling (hybrid LIU) and is fully modular.


UPDATE: 02-Aug-2016
The engineering sample is now ready and pilot pulling required cables/terminating and using is now planned over the weekend. This is not the final item but will be similar (some minor rework will be done in production sample after pilot results).  Here are some images of the sample piece:

Front Fascia (Cover Closed) - Flat side on left with lock, right side is latch based SP Patching

The Patching side opens independently of flat side cabling section.

The internals of an unloaded box

Bottom Fascia (for cable entry)

The cabling seems to be the most important part of solution. So why we should go for Patch panel ?

No doubt, the fact that all three kind of service distribution networks (Telephone wire, data cable, fiber optic cable and coax cable) are recommended to be inserted in each flat together is a very key part of the patch panel solution. But it alone is not enough. Just like the car engine might be rated by most as one of the most important part of the car. But by itself it is not the car. And most of us do not go to the market and buy a good engine and keep it. We buy the car (solution) as solution is what it is usable. The full Patch Panel solution is that car.

Comparisons aside, just putting cables only has some serious drawbacks:

1. If you put cables in conduits and let them hang around exposed, then they are susceptible to damage (for eg., rats in shaft, by construction workers ins haft, pulled by accident in apartment by kids, maids, interior workers, natural insulation degradation etc) potentially risking the integrity of the entire cable. Telecom cables are not as robust as electrical wires (especially optical fiber and cat6)
2. It does not help resolve the conduit per flat identification problem. 
3. Fiber optic cables and connectors need to be housed in dust free environments, otherwise they become useless. This can only be achieved by terminating the ends and housing them in dust free housings (Patch panel and wall faceplate)
4. If not connectorized, the connection change process still takes more time, due to splicing and connectorized jobs. 
5. Not connectorizing and terminating cables leads to greedily keeping long cable lengths on shaft side to eliminate risks of length being short and this causes lot of cable wastage. 
6. Some SP keep Floor distribution boxes at every floor (ACT and Airtel) but others like Pursuit keep one every 3 floors (to save ONT cost). So we do not know for sure how much cable length we should keep spare in shaft.  Their is no reliable way to join copper, cat6 and fiber cables unless they are housed in a proper junction box.

Bottom line is keeping spare cable lengths and just laying cables is not a good medium to long term solution, if at all it is a solution in the first place.

The unique business value of the Patch panel solution for residents is to convert the entire process of taking a  new connection or changing service providers ( a basic need and right of residents) a "plug and play" affair.  Just like if you buy a car, you can just drive it off, rather than buying an engine and lugging that around in another transport.

What are the real costs of the patch panel solution ?

At present the cost is around Rs. 3000/- per apartment for the basic cable package (parts + labor included). The top-level cost breakdown is illustrated below:

We are only collecting half this amount from owners (Rs. 1500/-), the rest will come from cost sharing by the builder and the service providers (Airtel, ACT and Pursuit).  

In particular one serious complication arises when deciding money to be  collected from owners:

1. No ISP is willing to out-rightly fund the entire patch panel solution for 1426 flats in our complex, especially when their is no guarantee on specific market share of business. But they are willing to share costs for the subscribers they connect. So the association has to seed the investment and then recover the costs from the service providers, necessitating a slightly higher fund collection per apartment than what may actually be required
2. In many floors, only one owner is a member of association. The other 3 are unknown and therefore they cannot be made to share costs immediately but will ultimately pay 1-2 years down the line. Still we need to provide the solution to the known member (resident or non-resident owner) while at same time trying our best to keep costs for those who pay early in control.

We hope all owners would appreciate these challenges and come forward to co-operate for community's good.