networking

Why Reliable WiFi Network Should Be a Priority for Every Building Owner

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I don’t usually recharge my mobile with a huge data plan because, in my home, I always connect my mobile to WiFi, which has better speed and unlimited data.

I only use my mobile data when I go outside.

When I was in the lodge, I checked if the lodge offered WiFi services.

In most cases, this is a mandatory service almost all lodges offer.

They also have a Free WiFi network in the lodge where I stayed.

While thinking about a password, I noticed the lodge network didn’t ask for a password for me to connect.

So, I directly connected without asking the receptionist for a WiFi password.

This is the wrong way to offer WiFi service.

Anyone can easily connect to the open network, which is not a good idea regarding security and usability.

As soon as I entered my lodge room, my phone’s WiFi signal was gone. I am no longer able to connect to Lodge’s free WiFi signal.

Looks Lodge offered internet service only for the namesake purpose.

I can only use their WiFi outside the room and standing in the passage. Not even able to sit also.

Hmm… I turned off my phone’s WiFi and turned on my mobile Data.

Even though they have a networking setup in their lodge, they set it up in such a way so no one can use their service.

From my assumption, they did this setup for advertisement purposes only, or the network guy didn’t properly educate the lodge owner or service provider didn’t bother to do his job properly to avoid the difficult tasks.

Whatever might have happened, the network set up in the lodge where I stayed a few days back is useless.

If you see my network setup in our two buildings, you will see the right way to do it.

All our tenants enjoy freaking awesome internet service (WiFi) in all their units, no matter where they stay near their units.

They always get Full signal, Good Speed… Best Internet Experience inside their house they might ever experienced anywhere.

That’s how anyone should plan if you are going to offer internet service, or else don’t bother offering just for namesake WiFi.

No one will go outside to use the internet. It’s not the best experience.

I don’t know how much experience you have with network setup, but I shared my recommended network setup for construction building in my Internet Everywhere Guide.

Read it, Understand it and Implement it.

Don’t just rely on the knowledge of service providers. Sometimes, they take shortcuts to save themself from doing the right work.

If you know the work, you can guide them according to your plan. Not just what they suggest you to do.

If WiFi is almost mandatory in Lodges, don’t you think it should also be in your building as well?

Pujari knows the importance of LAN setup

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Yesterday, we went to a few temples far from my home.

When I was praying… the pujari in the temple was speaking on the phone loudly. The conservation caught my attention when Pujari spoke about the LAN cable.

Hmm….

LAN cable? I paid attention to his words while I was there.

The pujari said to the other person on the phone, “I need LAN cable in the daughter’s bedroom and other room (maybe the hall). The picture should come clearly… Cost no need to worry.”

Based on the conversation I heard, I think the pujari is trying to install a LAN cable on the existing building to watch movies clearly.

They are possibly doing it in the existing building.

It looks like Pujari understood the importance of LAN cable installation in their home (possibly). As the temple is located in Bangalore, I guess he also has a good internet service, so they are doing this work.

Do you know what?

They are hiring skilled technicians to do the job. This means they will be charging based on per-meter charges for this wiring and installation setup.

Not just that…

Per point, they will charge extra as well. Total cost depends on the service providers.

If they do this work after the construction, the wire/pipe will be visible wherever they run the cable. It won’t look good.

That’s why I recommend that everyone who is going to construct a new house must do their house with a networking setup all over their building.

It is definitely a worthy investment.

Go through my Electrical Work Guide and Internet Everywhere guide. You should be able to save on installation costs as well.

Just read both guides and follow whatever I shared there.

You will be thankful to me once you start using those.

Even if you don’t know what you are doing, do it.

One or another day, you will realise the importance of that, and then, you won’t need to spend anything on wiring costs.

Pujari realised the importance of LAN cables, but one of my engineer friends didn’t realise it while constructing his house.

My friend thought WiFi would do the job.

I don’t argue with him because I won’t get paid.

If you want to listen to my suggestion, implement what I shared in my Electrical Work Guide and Internet Everywhere guide.

Here, I can recommend best practice because I get paid for doing so…

The choice is yours, as always.

An idea to think about…

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The day before yesterday, I talked about a movie I watched…

Today’s email is about the same topic. Which is related to a movie but in a different way.

If you regularly read my emails, you might notice some changes we made at home, which helped us.

Recently, we disconnected the DTH connection, and now we completely rely on the Internet, YouTube, and OTT apps for entertainment in my home.

It would be a good move if you could ask me.

No more time wasted on watching useless ads and getting updated entertainment at our fingertips.

However, not all can implement this in their home because you need a good broadband (internet) connection with unlimited data and a proper network plan to enjoy 4K videos without buffering.

If you don’t have those, you cannot enjoy them properly.

If you are a light internet user, then no issues.

If you are a heavy consumer, OTT will not help with the fake unlimited data with what other major service providers are offering.

To my knowledge, Excitel is the only major internet provider offering a truly unlimited plan.

If you have Excitel near your house, upgrade your TV to 4K and the latest version to truly enjoy entertainment at your house.

I don’t tell this easily.

Regarding entertainment, you might seen a trend of having a separate home theater.

If you will build only an owner-stay house and have a budget to build one extra floor/room for the home theater, do it.

See… till now, I never saw any value in those home theater.

Now, after seeing some changes in my home after upgrading the old TV to a new 4K TV, Old DTH to OTT Apps, and a good Home theater for a better sound system. It’s truly a different entertainment.

It’s never happened before.

I used to watch 1 or 2 movies a year on my PC. Now I watch 1 movie a week with all my family members.

Oh.. you might count time waste.

Ya, that’s right. But the feeling and energy after spending time with the whole family is worth spending 3 hrs watching a movie at home.

We don’t have a dedicated home theater room in our house. We cannot do that. Because it requires some good space & a good budget.

Everything we watch and enjoy is in the Hall itself.

Suppose you are building some luxury home, duplex, or triplex. In that case, you can consider having a separate floor or room for a home theater.

Most owners will be on a tight budget during construction time; if that’s your case, just build the extra floor or room and don’t bother doing any false ceiling or home theater setup during construction.

Don’t keep windows on the home theater floor/room; it isn’t required. Having windows actually costs more than without windows.

Once you are comfortable with the budget, hire professionals who take care of all those.

A quick search for home theater services on Google Maps will get a list of popular service providers in your area.

I will share my first reaction to seeing a home theater system tomorrow.

I still laugh at how I changed my view once I experienced myself in my home.

Arun

We no longer need any Dish or DTH setup

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To this day, we have been using a non-smart TV.

For this sale on Amazon and Flipkart, we ordered a good smart TV and a home theatre to go with it.

Both came.

We installed our smart TV and plugged our 400 Mbps internet cable to see its performance on a 4K TV.

I was slightly sceptical about its performance as my single internet connection is shared with all my rental property (16 doors + 2 owner house).

And that all our tenants are college students. If you know college students… you know they always have something to download.

When I play some 4K videos on our new 55-inch TV, that video comes without any buffering.

We have removed the DTH we were using with our old TV.

Usually, only my dad and mom watch TV. And they have few requirements.

They watch a few serials and some Kannada news channels. Now, with our internet connection, their serials come with some OTT apps.

And regarding Kannada news? They are now watching it on the YouTube app.

So their requirements are finished. They are watching it in HD video on the internet without any buffering.

They enjoy TV on the Internet rather than on the DTH connection.

Moreover, with plenty of OTT apps, they can also watch some good serials and movies of very good quality whenever needed and whatever movie they want.

Some have even 4K quality videos.

When asked about the dish/DTH setup, they said we don’t need it now.

The picture quality 4K videos on TV are simply awesome. Watching videos itself is a pleasure.

By the way, we didn’t connect our Smart TV with the WiFi option. We used a LAN connection.

That’s the recommended way to get a good-speed internet connection.

If you think wifi will do its job… You are wrong.

A wired connection always beats a WiFi connection anytime and every time.

I never expected I would be able to replace DTH with an Internet setup. But I did plan to have an internet connection all over the building.

It looks like it’s helping us stop the DTH recharge.

By the way, it’s already almost 1 week, and we have not yet connected our DTH cable to the TV.

Our Smart TV runs completely on the Internet without any signs of buffering.

I guess I won’t be going back to any DTH service anymore.

If you are building a new house, plan the right way to have a proper network setup all over the building.

This is another advantage I’m experiencing because of having a proper network setup all over my building.

I will soon be selling my old TV with my DTH setup. We no longer require both of them.

If you also want to implement such a setup in your house, I shared all my knowledge in my Internet Everywhere Guide.

This setup requires some internet service provider with high-speed internet and unlimited data, or you won’t be able to enjoy this.

Fortunately, Excitel internet service is available in my area, and I’m using it fully.

Oh.. by the way. Don’t be disappointed if no Internet service provider offers unlimited internet in your area.

None of them were available in our area when we were constructing our house. Still, I implemented Internet all over my building.

Now, Excitel has come, and they are offering an awesome plan.

You cannot implement it once construction work is over, even if you want to. So implement at the time of construction itself, and when it comes, you can also enjoy…

After watching movies on my TV, I’m already falling in love with it. I’m the guy who never watched TV for almost a decade.

I fell in love after enjoying the video quality with sound effects with the new home theatre system.

From now on, I plan to watch new movies weekly once with my family.

Everyone sitting in the same room and watching something is a different feeling.

Oh… It’s too much to explain all of this in an email.

Anyway, don’t forget to install Internet Allover in your building.

A smart TV without High-Speed internet is like a smartphone without internet/mobile data.

Arun

A ‘wired’ network issue…

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From last month onwards, we had a strange network problem in our building (both).

Because of this problem, most of our tenants and we could not connect to our WiFi router.

Anytime we connect, it keeps on disconnecting.

We never had an issue with a wired connection. 

This only happens on our sub-router, which we placed in our tenant’s house (in Access Point mode). In the main router, we never had any such issue. So this is something within our house network and has nothing to do with the internet service provider.

Usually, any kind of network issue happens in our house, I was the one who handled it. 

For some reason, I wasn’t able to fix this problem. All tenants keep on complaining about internet issues. 

This time, I decided to try a professional network engineer to fix this problem, and he also arrived at our house and asked how we did the wiring and how we connected…

I answered.

He also observed and noticed the same and informed everything you have done right. 

He also tried to do some tests by ping and all… and also tried checking wire connections.

He also didn’t understand the problem and tried to call some of his network friends, but their suggestions didn’t help.

He suggested one more solution: changing our unmanaged switch to a managed switch. Which cost around 12K per switch and we need two such switch. 

I’m fine with that solution. But our current switch is going to waste. I still agreed to his suggestion… but he didn’t promise it will 100% fix the problem.

I don’t have any other option, so I’m okay with experimenting with his suggestion.

He left home, informing me I would come next week with a switch.

One day, I got some free time and was playing with different router settings to fix the issue.

While experimenting with the setting, I found something wrong and fixed the setting. Immediately, the WiFi connection and disconnection issue was fixed.

I double-checked whether it really fixed the problem or not. It was fixed immediately….

I called that network engineer and informed them to cancel my switch order, and I paid 1K for just coming to visit our house. 

He also agreed and cancelled my order. 

If he had bought and installed a new switch in our house, it could have cost around 30K just to check…

Thankfully, I got the solution to the problem at the right time.

Now, we need to update the same settings for all the subrouters (which are used in Access point mode). I guess almost 20 routers we need to make changes.

It almost took half a day to make these changes in all routers. 

Now, we have zero issues with our network. 

All users (almost 50+ active devices) use a single internet connection without issue. 

That’s how you should design a network setup when constructing your house. 

Consulting a professional network of engineers is a costly thing.

Most electricians don’t know how to do proper wiring…

If you need internet service in every corner of your house without speed drop, WiFi signal issue, or any router limit, read my Internet Everywhere Guide.

I shared all my practical knowledge… which I implemented in both my building and using it successfully. 

No theory. Only praticle.

Arun

When is an ideal time to start planning for home automation?

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The best time to plan a home automation concept is… as soon as you get your house plan from an engineer, you can plan your home automation stuff.

First, you need to have a rough idea of what type of automation you need and where it will be installed.

Some automation requires special requirements, and some don’t require much.

Read more

Thought of buying a network box?

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Yesterday, my brother worked on some changes in the network box.

As it’s Sunday, we will always work on house-related stuff or improve the existing setup.

The current network setup has caused some issues over the past few months… so my brother decided to fix that issue by trying a workaround.

Somehow, we were able to fix that issue.

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Problem of not having a strong WiFi signal

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I opend my CCTV app on my phone and when I try to view cameras visuals… visuals open and suddenly stop showing.

This is some new issue I started facing in my new building. The reason is low WiFi signal. 

As it’s a new building, I haven’t done full proper networking setup. All the ports in my networking switch is already used. If I need to add more Wifi router, I need buy new network switch.

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Laying fibre optic cables

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BDA acquired many empty land in Bangalore to develop a BDA site.

The project name is “Dr K Shivaram Karanth Layout”. If you watch the news or read the newspaper, you might have heard about it.

After so much opposition from the land owner, BDA finally got a green signal from the court to acquire land.

But on a condition to give alternative sites once the development work is over.

For people who already have houses in those acquired areas (revenue sites) recently, the Supreme Court regularised those buildings built before the notification.

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