Scaleable guest Wifi and Telefony for hotels

Overview

The client isa large hotel and spa located on the north cost of Germany. Established in 2004 with over 350 beds, a 600 berth marina and two event venues with a total capacity for approximately 2000 guests across a campus of several independent buildings. The client engaged Dyonix in 2024, after the successful outcomes of another project, to modernise their existing IT Infrastructure.

After a careful fact-finding and planning phase, Dyonix redesigned and replaced the client’s ageing IT infrastructure with a modern, high performance solution to meet current and demands on their network that prioritises the guest’s experience at the hotel with the extensive support of back office, technical an IT functions.

The challenge

The customer had reported significant operational issues with their existing computer system, which struggled to service the growing demands of on guest WIFI, a legacy analogue phone system and underperforming enterprise IT systems resulting in frequent slowdowns and crashes.

These issues were compounded with an outdated network topology design and low capacity network connections on resource constrained networking equipment that demanded 24/7 operation.

As a result of these technical restrictions, network slowdowns and outages were commonplace. Guests had issues using and maintaining a good connection when on the hotels complimentary guest WIFI and guests were often unable to reach reception and back office staff via the facilities costly legacy phone system, leading to frustrated guests and staff as many of the phones had failed.

A major issue was the existing network topology design that lacked defined logical segmentation in both guest and production networks that left both open for exploitation through horizontal attack vectors within the network. Combined with the aging network hardware with low capacity links between buildings, lead to significant sub-optimal performance across the entire estate, that typically reached its saturation limit before the hotel was full.

There was a clear need for action to modernise the computer system, network, WIFI and phones to bring the companies IT inline with today’s standards that was aligned to the customers strict budget and limited time frame.

System Analysis and Proposed Solution

Our investigations identified and reported all major operational issues:

• Outdated and underperforming networking equipment interlinked with low bandwidth fibre optic links that did not have the capacity to support many hundreds of end devices with the bandwidth and latency requirements modern applications demand.
• Inadequate topology design and lack of structured network segmentation and firewall profiles presented a significant security and stability risk.
• The use of an antiquated analogue phone system with bolted on VoIP features presented a significant cost factor in terms of running costs, maintenance and support for hotel staff and guests.
• A massively outdated VMWare platform running a diverse set of Windows and Linux workloads with outdated and no longer supported operating system versions.

Our solution was a comprehensive upgrade of all major components in the network and replacing these with next generation components and concepts:

• Legacy networking equipment was replaced with high quality open networking alternatives with built in routing and security features that allowed for enhanced management and segregation of network features and roles. With next generation networking technology deployed in the core of the network we were able to achieve up to a 20x capacity increase to individual network areas and provide full active-active redundancy for networking components. Ideal to serve the current and future demands of the network for years to come.
• The introduction of a comprehensive network topology design that incorporates not only IPv4 but also the latest IPv6 connectivity with network functions and areas locally separated to reduce risk of horizontal network attacks and increase security through the control of the flow of data between segments in the guest and internal networks. This design has the added benefit of effectively containing network failures, configured to specific areas and reducing failure and diagnostic time when problems do happen.
• Dyonix replaced the entire phone system with a modern Asterisk driven VoIP system. With VoIP deployed across the entire campus, we were able to demonstrate significant cost savings while dramatically improving call quality and experience for guests and hotel staff alike.
• Hyper-V was chosen over replacing the existing VMWare with its lower cost of ownership due to the use of the Windows Server Datacenter licensing. Workloads were migrated with minimal disruption to end users over a short 1 month staged migration window.

 Benefits

Following the network upgrade the customer’s network is now able to support over 2000 concurrent guest and internal hotel devices running realtime video, VoIP and bulk web and download traffic loads without any slow downs or outages at peak times, while utilising the latest IPv6 protocols to provide a modern browsing experience for mobile devices natively accessing services such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Zoom and Netflix.

The new phone system eliminated all previous issues with the legacy system and provided a platform to actively monitor and resolve issues with room telephones. Hotel guests can now be greeted by name when calling reception due to the tight association of the phone to each individual room. Call costs were slashed by up to 70% due to the flexible phone tarifs from a leading German VoIP provider.

Finally with the migration to Hyper-V speed performance issues resulting from the legacy VMWare platform were eliminated and thanks to the familiarity of the Windows based administration, routine tasks could be accomplished with minimal training for internal IT staff. This allowed back office staff to now focus on the guest experience, without disruption to their workflows.

Conclusion

This case study clearly demonstrates the importance of a stable and high capacity core network infrastructure that is able to meet the data intensive demands of end users and applications. With wide ranging benefits stretching through into unified security and massive scaeability that every hotel and event venue needs to deliver successful and long lasting impressions on their guests. 

For more information and to find out how we can solve the performance issues with your network, please contact our team at bonjour@dyonix.mu