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Sprucing Up a Hotel Network

At a hospitality property in Maryland, a network project has an IT buddy at odds with me. He thinks my networking solution is a stopgap measure, but I disagree. Take a look and let me know what you think.

On this property, a direct buried cable connects a historic inn and 40-room motel located about 600 feet away. The limited-distance modems connecting the two buildings hadn't provided sufficient bandwidth for the traffic demands, and the property had to use both DSL and Wi-Fi service, which was spotty, for Internet connectivity.

The good news is that the direct buried cable is less than 10 years old, making it a good fit for Adtran's ActivReach technology.

Cable Runs
For the wireless access points (WAPs), property maintenance staff installed Cat 6 Ethernet cables where directed for the inn and the motel. The maintenance staff worked at various times from the fall through the winter to install the needed cabling. The cellar of the historic inn is linked to the office with two Cat 6 drops that directly connect to the buried cable connecting the two buildings. In the motel's equipment room at the other end, two Cat 6 drops directly connect using four pairs for each cable.

Using Adtran's ActivReach Netvanta 1535-PoE switches at both properties, we uplinked the eight pairs of direct buried cable at each end that appear as RJ45 connections and patched each into the ActivReach switch ports. Both ports are trunked and flagged as ActivReach. Next, we bonded or aggregated the two links and built a 200-Mbps span between the buildings.

Single Network
Both properties are now operating with one network and complete Wi-Fi coverage for their guests and internal use. The cost avoidance of direct burying fiber between the buildings is substantial and while more pairs are available on the underground cable to aggregate, we are reserving them for future use if we need to improve the link. We replaced the DSL with Comcast service. A UPS powers both ActivReach managed switches, with a single SSID for each network.

As I mentioned, my IT buddy thinks this is a stopgap measure and I disagree. The Wi-Fi network for hospitality must serve needs of the many and when it falls short room reservations will suffer. Comcast is only delivering 50/15 Mbps service and my 200-Mbps link is more than enough to support these needs today and in the future.

Installing fiber under roads and between buildings is challenging enough. Given the opportunity to use ActivReach proved that a single network could be built to solve the problems of this particular customer. Your thoughts? Share below!

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