Residential & MDU: Riverfront Apartments

Challenge

Meraki Solution

Results

The Full Story

Cliff Orloff tried to provide wireless internet access to residents of his high-end apartment community before most people had even heard of Wi-Fi. "It was a big headache," he says. "I tried workarounds using ethernet, using Linksys DSL boxes with PoE, and ethernet extenders and wireless routers.... There were always dead spots, and I constantly had to reboot them; the whole network was put together with chewing gum and bailing wire."

Once his cobbled-together network was up and running, he says, "it was just a lot of maintenance and headache. I had no idea who was logging on, I couldn't control it, or stop unwanted traffic."

When Orloff read about Meraki in the MIT Technology Review, he thought to himself, "This is exactly what I am looking for. It would exactly serve my needs in a very cost-effective way." He bought 3 Meraki Indoors and plugged them in at his own condo in the complex, and they immediately came on line. He bought 30 more, and deployed them. For backhaul, Orloff used one cable connection and one DSL connection, which provided both high throughput speed as well as redundancy should one of ISP connections go down. He shares one of these connections with the management office.

After a little fine tuning with the placement of the repeaters, and checking the Dashboard for various nodes' signal strength, he had his entire property covered in wireless in a day.

When one resident in a far corner unit complained of a weak signal, Orloff simply installed a panel antenna to amplify the signal to the radio. "Panel antennas have really helped me reach the coverage I need."

Satisfied with the Riverfront deployment, Orloff deployed similar networks in his two other properties, a condo community and an apartment complex in Indianapolis.

"There's been no hassle since then. It was a good solution from day one. A lot of software doesn't do what it advertises, but the Meraki did. There was no learning curve," he says.

Offering free wireless at his properties is strategic on Orloff's part. "It's not just an amenity that doesn't cost a lot. It's worth a lot," he says. Free Wi-Fi attracts a different class of clientele, he says, primarily better educated residents. At Riverfront, he has been pleased with the upswing in applications from med students from nearby University of California, Davis Medical School. He notes that even his advertising costs have gone down. He no longer places ads in the newspaper, but advertises exclusively on Craigslist, where his ideal, internet-savvy tenant is most likely to find him. And residents are happy to be free of $45 internet bills every month. As amenities go, Orloff says his free Internet service gets a lot more usage than his fitness centers.

"Meraki is just a very cost-effective amenity. I get big value with a very low investment," says Orloff. "I wish my cell phone worked as well as Meraki!"

Here's the recipe that Riverfront Apartments used to build their network.