A Practical Guide: Designing for Hospitality

Designing for Hospitality is written to provide a framework for network professionals, engineers, designers, and WLAN architects to use when designing and implementing the connectivity infrastructure in hotel and hospitality environments.

What’s Inside?

Network design for hospitality comes with its own set of unique challenges that are unlike those encountered when designing and deploying a network inside of a traditional corporate space. In the traditional environment, you have near-complete control over the devices that will be using the network. However, in hospitality, guests will use a variety of different devices, such as tablets, smartphones, and laptops, varying in brands, models, operating software, age, type, and more.

Despite this variety, your network needs to be able to accommodate every device that enters the building. The CommScope Designing for Hospitality Guide gives you the tools and information needed to build an interoperable network from scratch and get you ready to start accepting guests as soon as possible.

Our guide speaks from the perspective of a brand-new deployment, but regardless of the current state of your network’s deployment, this guide will help you meet your specific needs.

CommScope’s suite of RUCKUS wired and wireless network infrastructure provides an easy-to-deploy and simple-to-manage solution for the hospitality industry. Let’s look at the 4 ways RUCKUS can support your hotel with meeting the needs of today’s guests:

1 – Guest Wi-Fi That’s Fast and Reliable

Customers pick and choose their hotels based on the amenities they offer. One of the top requests is Wi-Fi, that’s fast and reliable. Terrible internet connections can be enough to tank your brand’s reputation with guests. It could be an executive customer working on an important project, a family trying to stream video on multiple devices, or friends trying to stay in touch with loved ones and post their latest social media updates. Regardless, your guests expect a stable and high-speed connection–and if you can’t provide it, they’ll go to a competitor who can.

According to a recent survey by DeepBlue, 63% of travellers confirm the presence of wireless connectivity before they book a room. Furthermore, 36% said they would not return to a property if they had a bad experience with a hotel’s wireless network.

To help hospitality businesses combat this issue, we created a solution to help hotels, motel chains, luxury resorts, and family-owned establishments offer best-in-class internet service. During a recent third-party test evaluating real-world “out-of-the-box” performance, RUCKUS was the only vendor able to simultaneously deliver stall-free streaming HD video to every client and support a “good” (4 out of 5) voice mean opinion score (MOS), while delivering as much as twice the throughput.

2 – Greater Business Productivity and Efficiency

At the end of the day, you’re running a business and the net operating income of your property is dependent on the revenue you can generate and costs you can save. We provide integrated IT and OT (Operations Technology) solutions to enable you to do both.

Bringing thermostats and occupancy sensors online, property-wide, offers significant savings in energy costs. Automatically track and replace mini bar inventory or use location-based marketing to drive revenue, track assets (room trays, luggage carts and restroom cleanliness) so staff don’t have to, automate and personalise the check-in and in-room experience for guests, and provide premium meeting space.

3 – Better Safety and Security for Staff and Guests

Your goal is guest comfort and satisfaction, and the safety and security of employees and guests are paramount to reaching that goal. CommScope RUCKUS helps prevent issues like lost room keys being used for unauthorised entry into rooms and other restricted areas.

For instance, let’s say a guest’s keycard falls on the ground and is found by someone with bad intentions. They begin randomly trying doors to see where the card works. By using RUCKUS infrastructure to bring your door locks online, the network immediately flags suspicious activity.

Staff can use employee safety devices (alert buttons on a lanyard) that run on your existing RUCKUS infrastructure and enable housekeepers and others who may find themselves in uncomfortable situations, to immediately alert for assistance with their current location.

In-room IoT solutions also give guests and staff an easy and hands-free way to contact help if needed.

4 – Powerful Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Algorithm Assistance

With RUCKUS Analytics, you gain access to advanced data aggregation and analysis to help push your hotel’s efficiency, productivity, and revenue to new heights. Our RUCKUS solution monitors your network’s traffic and device connectivity to make sure everything is running smoothly for staff and guests.

Machine learning allows you to gain valuable insights that would have been missed using traditional KPI analysis methods. It’s part of why we’re the preferred partner for renowned hotels such as The Royal Park Hotel in Rochester, Michigan, and the JW Marriott Marquis in Dubai.