The knowledge and experience of our members is quite vast.  So as part of our mission to improve the deployment of technologies across the industry, we are creating case studies to help our members share that knowledge with others.  HTNG's workgroups are working with HTNG staff to provide solid examples of how technology deployment has improved operations in hotels.  The documentation of these efforts would not be possible without hours of contributions from some of the best hotel, engineering, and marketing minds in the business who are members of our association - so we sincerely thank our members for collaborating on these case studies.   We are just getting started on publishing these documents. Check back often for more.

Internet Traffic Shaping Eliminates HSIA Complaints (2012)

Guest complaints about access speed on hotel internet connections are far too common.  This case study shows one approach to address this issue. It outlines the experience of a single property in the installation of a layer 7 network optimization solution in a hospitality environment. This technology enables the property to apply rules to promote, limit or eliminate traffic based on applications. An example would be to enable Skype since customers use it to communicate while eliminating peer-to-peer traffic because of liabilities and overall traffic consumption..

Leveraging Existing Copper Infrastructure with ADSL2+ (2012)

It is a well-known issue that a high percentage of today’s hotel properties were constructed before Cat 5 or fiber were part of the standard design requirements. Therefore a key challenge for many hotel owners is how to offer internet access in each guest room and, once installed, how to keep moving forward with increasing bandwidth requirements. This case study examines one option for solving the challenge of moving from a legacy system to a faster and more reliable solution using existing cabling infrastructure.

EPON Fiber Deployment Expands Bandwidth and Future-Proofs Network (2012)

Guest demand for IP bandwidth is rapidly increasing due primarily to guests’ growing desire to watch streaming videos online (IPTV). A High Definition (HD) video stream today can require as much as 20 Mbps (3DHD streams will double that demand). In addition to IPTV in the guest room, other services like telephones, environmental controls, mini-bar control, and door lock controls are capable of running over a single IP connection to the room. There are several methods to provide increased bandwidth to the guest room. The objective of this case study is to look at one emerging technology - optical fiber - as a shared medium. The Westin Hotel in Lake Mary Florida has deployed Ethernet Passive Optical Networking (EPON). EPON provides 1.25 Gbps, both upstream and downstream, and is capable of connecting up to 64 devices per port on the head-end equipment.

Have a case study idea? Contact us at // with a description of the objective, challenges and the solution (particularly focusing on how HTNG solutions helped address the challenge) and we'll look into developing the story.