I want to build a LAN, would you help?

[louai]

Good day guys,,

I want your suggestions in the following networking problem..

We want to establish a LAN in a building that has 5 floors, with each floor containing 4 apartments and 4 network connections in each apartment.

We want the minimum rate at each connection to be 20Mbps, we will provide Internet service, e-mail, TV, and video in demand for each user.

My questions

1. Can we use a (10/100) hub to connect each 4 connections within an apartment and connect each 10 hubs to a (100/1000) switch and connect the switches to a (1Gbps) switch.
2. In our country we don't have a cable TV, how can we connect the dishes to the machine holding the server for TV?
3. Do we have to have a server for each service, i.e. one for internet, one for TV and so on? and who can we interface the internet server to the socket which is connected to the leased line?

My regard, in advance.

 

[Garion]

To answer your first question, that should work fine. You've only got 16 connections per floor, however, so you could just pick up a 100BaseT Switch and plug 'em all into that. Won't work if you only have one cable going to each apartment and plan on using a hub for the 4 connectiions in each apartment, however. There are lots of 10/100 switches with a gigabit uplink, so you should have no problem finding one that would meet your needs. I'd say that gigabit is probably overkill as an uplink for 16 users, however - I've run (a while back, granted) 100+ users on a single shared 10Mb/s network.

TV isn't something that is easily distributed via a network. In fact, I don't know if you could do it affordably. To stream video, you need to be able to convert the analog TV siganls to digital. To do this with 100+ channels and stream them all at the same time, you'd be in a multi-million dollar server. Probably a bit out of your budget. Plus, remember that most satellite systems only have a couple of receivers, so you could really only show one channel at a time.

Depending on the size of your Internet connection, even a SOHO router would probably do fine. They generally handle up to about 5Mb/s fairly easily - The speed of five T1's bundled together. It's not very flexible, but it's plenty secure and would likely be just fine for your system. Cheap, too!

- G