WLAN Case Study: Langham Hotel - Solving the Wi-Fi Challenge

Meru Networks: Langham Hotel - Melbourne

Neeraj Subramanian: We considered other vendors. While those solutions are credible in the market space, we did find a lot of challenges in our particular environment relating to experience from outside of the building to inside of the building, and what made the environment more complicated was we've got a lot of concrete. All our guest rooms are concrete walls, and therefore single penetration into those rooms was also a challenge from the corridors into the guest rooms.

With the way we've deployed the Meru product, we've got all the APs on the corridors at the moment. They're all PoE. They're all on a single network, from guest rooms to function rooms to public areas. It's all on a single network and it allows us to roam between those areas without having to repurchase. This is a challenge we had before. We've gone from a system which had an AP in every guest room -- not commission grade, but it's more consumer grade deployment. They were not PoE, they were traditional paired adapter based APs. What that means is there are multiple points of failure.

With the old system we had, we used to average between 150 to 170 sort of issues we had to deal with with the old solution. When we had our focus groups, and talking to our front office and other teams in the hotel, the key thing was to try to reduce that and try to eliminate the root cause of all the problems we were having.

So we thought by having a new wireless broadband system, we'd make the guest experience a whole lot easier. They'd feel a lot more happy when they could purchase one thing and go anywhere in the hotel they want without having to repurchase. Obviously there's no added cost to it. But the ability to roam, close their laptop and it goes into sleep mode in their room, they come up to the bar and the function room, they just open it up. It's already remembered that it was there, just bring it up from sleep, no wait, you're connected and it's running. It's very seamless in the way that we've actually deployed the Meru and our solution. Or we can service guests in other ways. For example, our front office staff, the front line support for our guests, it's already taken the pressure off them.

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Science & Technology

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