Ford’s Colony at Williamsburg is a premier multi-generational, gated community on 3,200 acres in Williamsburg, Virginia. Established in 1985, it consists of 3,000 single-family homes, townhomes and condominiums and is home to the privately owned Ford’s Colony Country Club, with three championship golf courses, and Marriott’s Manor Club, a 200-unit vacation ownership resort. The community is self-governed by the Ford’s Colony Homeowners Association (FCHOA), which manages a yearly budget of approximately $9 million to maintain common areas, roads, walking trails, security and support services for about 7,000 residents.

Developed in sections from the mid-1980s, Ford’s Colony had accumulated a patchwork of antiquated network technology: 12 separate internet drops across the property, with each facility, from maintenance buildings to security gates, operating as an independent, siloed network node. To manage basic operations the IT team relied on inconsistent VPNs to bridge these locations, so traffic had to be routed off the property, adding latency, reducing security and making it difficult to share files or video.

Security was a major concern. A dozen Network Video Recorders (NVRs) were scattered across the property, and retrieving footage meant physical travel to individual sites or unstable remote connections. The gate systems ran on outdated analog technology and POTS lines that could no longer support necessary upgrades, leading to operational failures and frustration for guests, residents and staff.

The residential community had also been reliant on the local incumbent provider, which brought stagnated technology, a lack of infrastructure upgrades and rising costs without improvements in service quality. The FCHOA needed a partner that could consolidate its fractured network into a single, cohesive system capable of supporting modern security and operational demands for both its business and residential needs.

Glo Fiber Business collaborated with Ford’s Colony to design and deploy a dedicated private fiber network. The infrastructure project involved installing nearly 300,000 feet of conduit, replacing the previous “spaghetti” of 12 separate internet drops with a single unified Local Area Network (LAN). Glo Fiber Business provided extensive design iterations and navigated the complexities of a brownfield deployment in a developed community with existing underground utilities.

The solution includes 500 Mbps Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), giving the community services building guaranteed bandwidth, and Hosted Voice to replace aging analog phone lines with IP-based communication. Glo Fiber Business also implemented Managed WiFi, Managed Network and Managed Switch services, backed by 24/7/365 NOC support, with a dashboard that gives the FCHOA centralized management and port-status visibility.

The architecture moved Ford’s Colony from a disjointed collection of networks to a single, secure ecosystem. All security traffic and data now remain inside the closed private network, and video data is centralized on a single server rather than a dozen disparate recorders. The guard gates run on digital IP systems, and the community is positioned to use the bandwidth for future enhancements such as a new IP-based gate entry system and community-wide streaming of town halls and educational webinars.

• Replaced 12 separate internet drops with a single unified private LAN, built on nearly 300,000 feet of new conduit
• Approximately 30 terabytes of streamed video per week now handled internally, which the previous infrastructure could not do
• Security and video traffic stay inside the closed network, with video centralized on one server instead of a dozen NVRs
• Guard gates moved from analog POTS lines to digital IP systems with instant, clear communication and no line noise
• Centralized dashboard lets IT staff identify and troubleshoot specific port issues immediately rather than waiting for total system failure
• Maintenance response is immediate, often with contractors on-site within the hour, versus days-long outages with previous providers