+1 for the Genius bar at Apple, Inc.

Giving credit where credit is due is important. With that said, lets jump in…

I had the unfortunate pleasure of having to visit my local Apple store to fix not one, but two devices. As I expected upon walking in, the store was packed full of new potential and existing customers. As I proceeded to enter the store I was pleasantly greeted by a man with an iPad. He then asked if I had an appointment. Thankfully, I did…but for only one of my devices??? The gentleman upfront with his iPad said no worries and asked me to take a seat at one of the “square tables”. Within minutes I was being helped by some who was very competent. Though spending 2 hours in the store (partly my fault for not remembering my iCloud password) they took care of both my devices and even offered to set them up. I was shockingly surprised at the level of customer service I received in what appeared to be a slightly chaotic store.

How many of us put our customers first in our business? How can we provide a truly positive user experience?

Kudos to you Apple, Inc. Your Genius Bar made it happen for me!

Could you hold my spot please?

The Verge highlighted an article today where an iPad is waiting in line to buy the new iPhone 6S.
YEAH, you heard it right......An iPad!
How will other consumers waiting in line feel about their place behind a piece of technology? What does this mean for the future of buying? Are the camp sites in front of Apple the day before a new product release going digital?
"Lucy" highlighted in the article plans to purchase her phone without actually being there. In person that is. Read more about "Lucy" and her experience here....

Designing for an excellent student experience

Today’s students arrive at college with an average of more than six devices requiring a high-speed Internet connection. These devices include smart phones, tablets, notebooks, e-readers, gaming consoles, smart TVs, FitBits, and VoIP phones. Moreover, industry observers foresee 10-15 devices per student becoming a reality in the not-so-distant future. 

At the same time, content providers continue to innovate.

A few years ago, Netflix started streaming HD content, and the popularity of its video streaming service surged. In student housing, more than 50% of residents started streaming this HD video feed. According to Netflix, in one three-month period, the average speed for its streams on Comcast's network increased 50%%, from 2.5 Mbps to 4+ Mbps.

Today, to prevent buffering – i.e. choppy or interrupted viewing -- residents now need at least 20 Mbps of bandwidth just to stream a single Netflix 4K show. By 2017, Netflix and other content providers plan to offer 8K video streams, which will require 50 or more Mbps.

More users, along with the explosion of video-centric devices and apps such as Roku, Apple TV, KindleFire,  and Chromecast, paired with more advanced video content, such as Netflix 4K, Hulu+, and Amazon Prime have increased the demand for data capacity at today’s student housing communities.

According to survey data released at both the 7th Annual InterFace Student Housing Conference and the 2015 Annual Broadband Communities Summit, Internet connectivity continues to top pools, patios, clubhouses--and in some cases, location -- in terms of the most important amenities students look for. But with ever-increasing demands for Internet bandwidth and reliability at many properties, providing this single amenity isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it proposition.

This article shares, in non-technical terms, InfiniSys’ views on how to meet this increased demand and keep residents happy at a student housing community.

 To increase the flow, you need bigger pipes.

Using the analogy of a water system helps illustrate InfiniSys’ philosophy toward engineering a robust Internet infrastructure in student housing. Have you ever been scalded in the shower when someone flushes the toilet? This typically happens in water systems with pipes or pumps that are too small.

A well-designed water system has large pipes and pumps, and enough electricity to enable water to flow easily. The system pulls water from a large source, such as a reservoir, and feeds into a network of smaller pipes, which eventually end at the house or apartment unit. Sometime these systems will include local storage such as a water tower to meet peak demands.[JH1] 

So, how does this relate to high-speed Internet at the property?

Being scalded in the shower when someone flushes the toilet is akin to numerous residents trying to use the same Internet connection with too little bandwidth, substandard infrastructure, inadequate electronics, or all of the above.    

Take the example of one student resident Skyping with his parents, another streaming House of Cards on Netflix, a third taking an online exam and yet a forth booking his airline ticket home.  Now, multiply this by all residents in the student housing community: the Skype call sounds garbled, House of Cards freezes up, the test-taker fails his exam because he can’t submit it on time and the would-be traveler gets a message that his request is “processing” but never gets a confirmation message. He’s left wondering if he needs to resubmit his information, and risk having his credit card charged twice.

Just as a water system needs properly-sized pumps and pipes, as well as enough electricity to power them and water towers for peak use, student housing communities need a well-engineered and robust physical infrastructure to provide high-speed Internet. 

This includes a large fiber backbone (pipes), electronics (pumps), bandwidth, (electricity) and a cache (equivalent to a water tower).  These components enable content, such as video, voice, games, e-mail, and web pages (the “water” in this system) to traverse the network.

Start with your fiber backbone

The most critical element of a system’s infrastructure is its fiber backbone and subsequent copper data cabling. 

InfiniSys has been designing its NetworkedApartment™ systems to meet industry commercial standards for the last 25 years. Our fiber backbone is rated to more than 100 Gbps per strand, with copper data cabling that’s rated to more than 1 Gbps.

Electronics are then tacked onto the pipe and may include routers, caches, Internet switches, and wireless access points.

What’s inside the apartment

Using our SmartApartment™ design, we install robust infrastructure to outlast existing and projected standards and provide enough bandwidth to satisfy connectivity needs. Currently, that translates into the delivery of a minimum of 1 Gbps to each data jack.

Once the correctly sized fiber and electronics are in place, owners can offer residents bandwidth speeds of more than 10-50 times greater than what students have received from older traditional cable modem and DSL services.  All in-unit switch ports have 1 Gbps ratings, and all backbone switches have either 1 or 10 Gbps ratings, depending on the location within the system. All high-bandwidth locations, such as smart TV and gaming console outlets, have dedicated 1 Gbps switch ports.

Caching in on your residents’ Internet experience

Behind the scenes, a caching server may be employed to mitigate heavy repetitive video sources such as Netflix.  By definition, a caching server stores content locally, similar to a water tower keeping water on hand close by.  It provides for reserve or boost capacity during periods of high video traffic downloads. Incorporating a caching server, which can be located at the property or at the service provider’s facility, is especially effective when incorporated as part of a managed Ethernet system.

Managing your Wi-Fi network

The type of Wi-Fi access points you use, and how you use them, affect your residents’ experience.  Each Wi-Fi access point operates at a given frequency standard, and needs a certain level of traffic management. Typically, the access points included within a cable-modem or DSL-modem are of the retail variety and are not designed to handle multiple simultaneous users. 

More robust access points employ a multi-radio, multi-frequency or multichannel streaming model.  A satisfactory multi-user experience depends on the number of users, the number of devices each user has, and the location of the access point.

What about the 802.11ac standard?

The 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard is here. For example, the Apple MacBook Air, IPhone 6 both of which  are quite popular among students, already has 802.11ac Wi-Fi capability, in addition to 802.11n capability, as do many new digital cameras. To satisfy the desire to be able to market a property as having the latest, most up-to-date technology amenities, we recommend using 802.11ac+n band 2x2 minimum wireless access points.  For unit access points the ratio should be 1 AP for every 4-6 students.Gauging the resident experience

Resident satisfaction should not be based on speed tests run over a browser – such as OOKLA speedtest.net, for example – but rather on their experience of audio and video content.  Determining performance over a Wi-Fi network becomes even more challenging when using other wireless enabled devices such as iPhones, because the device itself can become a limiting factor in the results.

InfiniSys professionally tests and stresses our Internet backbones to determine how fast the website loads, whether Netflix constantly buffers, or if the game freezes up at a critical moment.

A word about cable and DSL modems

Where necessary, InfiniSys can incorporate cable-modems and DSL-modems into this infrastructure. But property owners should note that an Internet delivery system that uses older cable-modems or DSL-modems is similar to a poorly designed and unmanaged water system.  In the future with the release of the DOCS 3.1 standard and other advanced technologies cable-modems again may be a viable alternative for providing high capacity bandwidth.  The systems however will need to be of current generation cabling, IE RG-6 meeting the required distance limitationsWhen used in a student housing property, such technologies often provide for a less-than-satisfactory user experience.  Students typically report a significant degradation in system responsiveness when more than 60-75% of residents try to use the system simultaneously. A typical student network has 95% or higher utilization during peak evening hours. 

While cable companies may advertise cable-modems with very high downstream bandwidth, they typically have limited upstream capability and do not manage multiple users effectively, again this will be somewhat solved with the DOCSIS 3.1 technology.  Students then experience the issues described above: losing connectivity, getting garbled audio or frozen video, or not being able to finalize a transaction online.

Using the water system analogy again thinks of an entire neighborhood irrigating its lawns at the same time -- just a small stream would emerge from each sprinkler or shrub head.  In most cases, the municipality gives each house certain days to use water to reduce the system’s overall water usage and increase the individual experience. 

But imagine telling student residents that they can only use the Internet during certain hours and on certain days! Modems simply do not offer the requisite capacity to satisfy the user experience today’s students demand.

So what does InfiniSys recommend?

How much bandwidth do property owners need to provide their residents with a great user experience?  Assuming a proper NetworkedApartment™ infrastructure with current electronics and a sufficient number of managed access points in place, InfiniSys recommends that property owners provide enough reserve “pumping capacity” to afford a consistent and acceptable user experience at all times.

Below is a chart with our bandwidth recommendations based on anticipated demand:

2015-2016

75MB -100MB Per 100 students depending on the type of school the property is near. For example, engineering students and schools that offer many video and online classes require far more bandwidth than those that do not. 

2017-+

May increase to 200 MB Per 100 students

We should emphasize that the bandwidth recommended above works only when it is part of a well-managed network operating on a robust infrastructure.  Each element functions as part of a system to provide an excellent user experience.  We could have the best water system infrastructure in a town; however if the pumps are not managed correctly, we might still have the scalding shower experience.

In addition, the user experience depends on choosing a technology service provider who can effectively and proactively manage the network from the property to the end user.  The service provider must offer a pro-active customer support system to ensure a satisfactory student resident experience, with alternative means of resident outreach such as “texting” or “chatting,” and not just a telephone help desk.  This includes employing regular surveys and focus groups to validate the service offerings.

Connecting it all together for fast, reliable and robust connectivity

Just as a poorly-designed water system won’t work well without adding more pumps or increasing the amount of electricity powering it, so too is the case with Internet connectivity.  If a property doesn’t have scalable fiber and electronics, residents will get kicked offline, not hear the person they’re talking to on the phone, or fail their exam for not being able to hit the submit button.  Students invest in the latest technologies and fully expect their devices to work where they live.

InfiniSys advises its customers to use well-engineered, robust technologies that can withstand changes and upgrades using proven, standards-based designs.  InfiniSys is available to counsel owners, developers and property management companies on Internet and other technology based amenities, which have become the deciding factors for students choosing a property today.

Prepared by the Team at InfiniSys, Inc.

Updated 09_2016

Fiber to the unit...lets discuss

In a previous piece, we talked about how apartment owners can still use the structured copper cabling they’ve installed in their buildings to deliver gigabit Internet speeds to residents, without running fiber optic cabling to each apartment. That’s good news because it means apartment owners who have spent the last 20 years improving the structured cabling in their buildings aren’t at a disadvantage in the amenities race. You can still truly achieve – and market -- gigabit speeds by running fiber to centralized “comm” rooms in your buildings and then bridging the gap to your apartments (within certain distance limitations) with Cat5E or Cat6 copper cabling. The key in doing so successfully comes down to making sure you spec robust, quality electronics in your comm rooms to deliver that signal. Now, I’d like to talk about those situations where owners may want to consider running fiber all the way to the apartment unit today. As the costs of fiber electronics have come down overall, you are looking at hundreds of dollars per apartment today, versus thousands of dollars in the past. Some situations may warrant the higher overall price tag of running fiber to the unit. For instance, in market-rate luxury new apartment construction today, where land costs are at a premium, owners can gain valuable, rentable space in their buildings by eliminating the comm rooms that have been used in the past. By running fiber to the unit in these situations, it can make sense to spend a little bit more upfront to gain income-producing space down the road. It’s a testament to the success of this approach that many service providers today are starting to run fiber to the unit in luxury builds, rather than use the older comm room architecture. Garden-style student housing is another good candidate for running fiber all the way to the unit. Because of the typical layout and design of this architecture, and the distances between buildings, fiber to the unit in these instances may be the only practical way to deliver robust signals to your student users. Students, of course, are power users, bringing as many as 10 connected gadgets each to school with them. So ensuring you have enough firepower in those situations is another benefit of running fiber to the unit. All that said, you still want to do a cost benefit analysis to determine if fiber is the best option. In mid-rise student housing builds, for example, the comm room model will still likely be the most feasible solution today. Another surprising place you may want to choose a fiber to the unit architecture is in the active senior living space. Seniors are becoming more connected today, as their Millennial children and grandchildren have introduced more and more gadgets to them for cross-generational communication. We’ll look at this trend in more depth in a future article. To sum up: • Owners who have structured cabling and employ a comm room model can still offer gigabit speeds to compete in the amenities race today. • Fiber-to-the-unit may present advantages in new luxury construction, student housing garden-style, and active senior living builds. • Even with the reduced cost of fiber optic electronics, it’s still essential to do a cost-benefit analysis to determine which model is right for you. By: Richard Holtz, CEO of InfiniSys.

Smart apartments get real

Forbes is highlighting two instances where smart apartments are becoming real. First, it looks at utility metering company NWP, which has helped apartment owners keep a tab on gas, water and electric use in the past. The firm is now testing certain smart devices, such as locks, thermostats and automated lighting at some of its clients’ apartments in California to see how residents respond. CEO Ron Reed tells the magazine installing the smart devices can help owners save money by being able to turn up or down thermostats when residents move, or eliminate the need to switch out locks. Meanwhile, Greystar Management is working with tech start up Iotas in Portland to install $900 worth of sensors in some of its apartments. It plans to use data from those sensors to recommend ways residents can save money on utilities, as well as market future smart home devices. Seems like two solid steps toward making the much-talked about possibility of smart apartments a reality sooner rather than later.