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onShore offers high-rise tenants a choice
by Michael Cloutier
published in the August 2002 issue of the Chicago Computer Guide
www.chicago-computer.com
Snug in your high-rise apartment, do you find going out to rent a movie a hassle? Are you frustrated by the limited selection of pay-per-view titles on your cable or satellite service?
What if you could fire up a box that delivered true DVD-quality videos, spanning 1,000 or more titles of first-run movies, Broadway plays and sporting events as well as art and foreign films, to your TV? Would you pay extra to have that kind of flexibility and quality?
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Chicago-based systems integrator onShore Inc. (www.onshore.com) is betting on a "yes" to all of those questions. Right now the only catch is that you have to live in one of the 10 buildings currently equipped with onShore's multi-tenant data network. "We developed the MDN infrastructure approximately three years ago as an adjunct to our system integration business," explains Nick Valavanis, onShore vice president and director of sales. "We took our skill of building LAN and WAN systems and applied them to where we saw a huge gap in services in large residential buildings and commercial buildings." |
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MDN represents a different way of thinking about building high-tech communications infrastructures into new construction and established buildings.
There are three basic components to the MDN system:- Live, 100 megabits-per-second-switched ethernet connection to every unit
- Robust enterprise-level servers on-site
- T1 lines on the back end of those servers to provide Internet connectivity.
The conventional way of thinking about telecommunications infrastructure is, at the most, to provide telephone, ethernet and coaxial cable in the walls so that customers can have individual service providers provide them with connectivity.
Instead, MDN provides a complete on-site, high-speed managed network. This option has many advantages for multi-unit residences. Anyone in a building equipped with MDN has full 100 Mbps access to the internal servers. These provide e-mail, Web hosing, Web content caching(which makes popular Web sites load at full 100 Mbps speeds), file serving and backup as well as onShore's new DVD-on-demand pilot program.
The onShore system doesn't require individual T1 lines in each unit. Two or more T1 lines are sufficient to supply large numbers of users because actual bandwidth use is load-balanced by the servers. For all Internet access—like e-mail and Web browsing—each user is not limited to the small amount of bandwidth they can afford.
Buildings with as few as 100 units to as many as 700 or more have enough density to make MDN financially feasible, says Valavanis. MDN represents an excellent potential revenue stream for building owners who can charge their tenants for any of the services available.
In the case of DVD-on-demand, onShore will have a dedicated Linux server with a terabyte of RAID 5 storage, which can hold roughly 1,000 movies along with other content. The client side will be a set-top box that is basically a stripped-down PC with no hard drive and only an infrared remote to operate it. According to Valavanis, the set-top box will have a menu system similar to digital cable and satellite systems. Customers will be able to search through the various content based on genre, artist, title and other information.
The server and client software is provided by Roomster, which provides a similar service for hotels. Additionally, Roomster will supply most of the content as well since the company already has negotiated the licensing required to provide movies and other titles.
According to Valavanis, getting the major studios to license their content was very difficult because of the studios' fear of potential abuse of the copyrighted materials. The studios were very resistant to this market, and when they eventually signed on they required their licensees to disable the ability for the set-top boxes to rewind or fast forward.
At the moment only pausing is allowed during playback, which while not ideal, is an option not offered by pay-per-view. Valavanis notes that subscribers easily could set a VCR to record the content during viewing and play it back at their leisure.
The pilot MDN program will start at the end of the summer at onShore's North Pier tower location. Stelios Valavanis, Nick's brother and president of onShore, commends the owner of the location, Broadacre Communications, for its forward-thinking attitude that made the pilot project possible.
Based on reactions to its DVD-on-demand project, onShore plans to market broader uses of MDN infrastructure. onShore's eventual goal is to change the way real estate developers and architects think about communications infrastructure in their buildings.