Hotel Group Uses Allot Solution to Provide 5-Star WiFi Service
About Hotel Group
Our customer currently manages five lavish hotels that double as convention centers, offering flawless customer service that provides “everything in one place.” All five resorts boast thousands of guestrooms as well as convention/meeting/ballroom space covering hundreds of thousands of square feet.
In each of the facilities, dedicated Internet service is provided by a Gigabit fiber-optic backbone with 100-megabit edge connections for meeting rooms, ballrooms and exhibit hall space. Wireless Internet access is available in all guestrooms, meeting and exhibit facilities. Each resort provides an always-up installation that serves thousands of Internet users every day of the year.
Challenge
The hotel group’s Internet access problems started on the exhibition floor where often, a handful of vendors at a show were monopolizing the available bandwidth. Today, many exhibitors rely on live demonstrations that use Internet access for real-time applications. Reliable service can make or break success of a demo at a show. The customer’s convention package offered flat rate Internet access because they had no way to track or regulate bandwidth usage, or to charge differently for different levels of consumption.
Using a very specific function of their WiFi access, the Hotel Management company was able to assign users a static level of bandwidth, based on the point of login, and to make static adjustments as additional users logged on. However, if one of the first users suddenly began a large file transfer or a P2P download, the performance of the next users in line would suffer. Our customer had no way to see what was happening on the network and had no way of controlling the bandwidth consumption per user.
Solution
The hotel group deployed Allot Service Gateways to deliver better visibility and control of their mission- critical networks at each resort location. For example, its Nashville location has three local networks (guest, convention, administration) connected to a 1GE fiber backbone. Each LAN is further divided into virtual LANs representing different user groups. By mapping each VLAN into the policy table within the Allot NetXplorer management system, our customer monitors traffic and enforces fair use on the VLAN according to customizable priorities.
Currently, guest rooms receive a fixed amount of WiFi bandwidth, while convention and showfloor areas have policies that fluctuate bandwidth according to guest needs. The hotel group has created more than 40 different service plans for a single event, with broadband speeds ranging from 256Kbps to 13Mbps.
Allot NetXplorer’s real-time reporting and connection control gives the Hotel Group the flexibility to increase bandwidth at a moment’s notice if a customer feels that the package they purchased is insufficient. Upgrading the internet package to meet customer needs in real-time translates to revenue earned.
Conference coordinators at each location leverage the granular usage reports provided by Allot NetXplorer to improve resource planning and to make future events more profitable. At the end of an event, vendors and exhibitors receive a NetXplorer report showing them how much bandwidth they consumed and an offer to purchase a better package for next year’s event. Since deploying the Allot solution, selling tiered Internet-access and upselling premium packages have made providing bandwidth a more profitable tool for the hotel group.
Benefits
With Allot bandwidth management solutions in their hospitality networks, our customer reports several benefits:
- Bandwidth allocation: Ability to manage bandwidth allocation and service performance separately for multiple, diverse groups including resort staff, guests, and events
- Reduced congestion: Mainstage network runs smoother by limiting/blocking P2P file-sharing during peak usage hours to avoid congestion
- Better resource planning: The Nashville location has not needed to upgrade its network infrastructure since it installed the Allot Service Gateway
- Increased revenues: Through tiered service packages and upselling during and after conventions and other events
