Compex Garden Hotel Hotspot Solution

Background 

Garden Hotel is ideally located just minutes away from the heart of Singapore's Shopping Paradise/ Entertainment and Financial District. Suitable for leisure and business travelers, their cozy and homely rooms are built around a spectacular 4-storey open atrium. It combines old world charm and hospitality to make any guests’ stay, to be comfortable and pleasant. Conveniently located just minutes from the MRT Station, Orchard Road shopping and entertainment belt, it is highly accessible with their complimentary daily shuttle service. The rising need to improve and provide value added services to their corporate and business guests is one of their many initiatives to remain competitive in today’s hospitality industry.

As Internet access in public facilities such as airport terminals, hotels, convention centers, and cafes is a growing phenomenon, by offering wireless hotspot facilities, Garden Hotel would be able to differentiate themselves amongst other hotels to provide value added services, helping attract and increase the numbers of guests. One of the many challenges that Garden Hotel faces is their structural layout which has a huge impact of reflecting or absorbing the wireless signals which provides Internet access. Garden Hotel also required a simple management, accounting and billing solution to support them in launching the hotspot initiatives.

The Challenge 

In aspects of network design and implementation, minimal disturbance to the hotel guests during their stay is of utmost importance to Garden Hotel. Any physical work during installation should also not hinder their employees in carrying out their daily tasks and duties. 

As with all hospitality projects, the overall aesthetic design of the equipments used are crucial to maintain the ambience of the surrounding environment. Extensive cabling and exposed Ethernet points would be costly, unsightly and detrimental to the image of a modern and clean hotel. Implementing such a system would require the deployment of a communication network spanning the entire building. Moreover, having facility installations like air-con ducts and insulation piping in the building, has added to the level of difficulty for selecting suitable installation points for both the access points and antennas to extend the network coverage. 

Designing a Hotspot network to meet the needs and requirements of a wireless solution with monitoring ability, traffic management, easy maintenance and backup of accounts information will also require a high level of fault tolerance to support its functionality as well as providing network redundancy. The wireless equipments must have a high level of robustness to prevent any network nodes failing and have multipoint fail-over support to enable any isolated nodes to be connected back to wireless network. This is to ensure minimum access downtime for service reliability. 

One of the main challenges for implementing wireless network in a hotel is the accessibility location and internet access speed which is a service level standard that the hotel guest will readily pay and use for their conveniences. Due to typical layout of all hotels is to have their bathroom situated next to the entry of their room, this causes signal degradation when the bathroom walls will absorb significant amount of the wireless signal strength.

Wireless Network Solution

One of the main advantages of wireless network implementation is the avoidance and cost savings of network cabling. This is achieved by configuring access points to link to a gateway as a management unit and extending the wireless coverage to enable more wireless clients to be connected to the network for Internet access.  

However, in implementing wireless connectivity, one of the main challenges is the speed of the network services required. In many set-ups, the wireless access points are still connected via cables to the gateway unit to ensure a more reliable backhaul connection and throughput. 

Using Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), it also helps IT integrators and to deploy the wireless access points faster and easier to prevent looping of data packets and increases the robustness of the network. STP technology enables the network to have learning capability. It sends out probes signals to various network points within the network to learn the shortest path for data packet transfers from point to point. The network path will automatically re-configure itself if any of the network nodes has a weak signal power and will attempt re-connecting the node back to the network through other access points.

The Solution

Two key areas of coverage, the Hotel Lounge area and Poolside Café where their in-house guests visit frequently, were identified by Autocom (a local Internet HotSpot System Integrator) for Garden Hotel deployment.. 

Compex’s HotSpot-NP28G is deployed as a back-haul gateway. HotSpot-NP28G is an all-in one gateway with HotSpot management facilities that is able to issue 253 IP addresses for wireless clients, generating unique access keys for connecting to the Internet access as well as thermal printing of billing tickets. 

The built-in walled-garden feature prevents rogue access to Internet by hijacking any Internet request to a Web Access Page which any wireless clients will require to key in the unique access password for their log-in account to access the Internet. This is a strong security feature that prevents any rogue clients from decrypting such passwords as it will expire upon usage. 

In design consideration for good network coverage and maintaining high throughput to wireless clients, careful and conscientious network planning and configuration were carried out to determine the placement of Compex Access Points in strategic positions to extend the hotspot coverage. An access point is deployed each at the two locations covering the Lounge and the Poolside café extending wireless hotspot coverage to these areas and to the guests rooms. 

Usage of Compex's external high-power antennas (WA-HGA-12-D) is utilized to improve signal strength and strengthen the coverage.

 

Compex Wireless Hotspot Application

Compex wireless HotSpot and access points with other networking products can be used by system integrators as well as ISPs as a turn-key solution for implementing wireless Internet access for café owners, hostels, hotels, school campus, shopping malls and public access zones.

With Compex’s proprietary technologies, like Pseudo VLAN, Parallel Broadband for bandwidth aggregation and unique Spanning Tree Protocol algorithm, Compex products are feature rich, making them the ideal choice of networking products exceeding the industry price-performance expectation.