WiFi for hotels

Hotel guests expect WiFi to work in their room the way it does at home: fast enough to stream video and join calls, and simple to connect to. Meeting the expectation means designing for guest rooms first, planning separately for conference and event spaces, and keeping guest, staff and building systems apart on the network.

Guest rooms

Guest rooms are where most complaints start. Hotels are built with many walls, bathrooms with tile and mirrors, and often concrete floors between storeys, all of which weaken WiFi signals. Guests also bring several devices each and use them heavily in the evening, when nearly every room is occupied at once.

Hallway versus in-room access points

Older hotel designs often mounted access points in corridors to cover several rooms each. Signals then have to pass through doors, closets and bathroom walls to reach the bed and desk, and capacity is shared across many rooms. Many current designs place access points inside rooms, often wall-mounted, sometimes every room and sometimes every second or third room depending on construction and expected use. In-room placement gives better coverage at the desk and bed, smaller cells and more capacity. It also needs cabling to each room, which is easiest to plan during construction or renovation.

Floors above and below

In wood-frame or lightly built hotels, access points on neighbouring floors can be heard clearly. The channel plan must include all floors, and transmit power should be kept moderate. See WiFi channel planning.

Meeting, conference and event spaces

Ballrooms and meeting rooms can go from empty to several hundred connected devices in minutes. They need a high-density design with enough access points on separate channels, narrower channels in 5 GHz, and enough wired and internet capacity behind them. Event organizers may also want dedicated networks, higher bandwidth or temporary changes for presenters and exhibitors. See High-density WiFi design.

Public areas and back of house

Lobbies, restaurants, pools, fitness rooms and outdoor patios each have their own needs and construction. Pool areas and kitchens add humidity, heat and metal; outdoor areas need weather-rated equipment. Back-of-house areas such as housekeeping, maintenance and loading docks matter too, because staff increasingly rely on phones, tablets and handheld devices for work orders, room status and communication.

Network separation and guest access

A hotel network carries very different kinds of traffic:

• Guest internet access, which must be isolated from everything else.
• Staff and administrative systems, including point of sale and property management.
• Building systems such as door locks, thermostats, cameras, signage and elevator or energy management controls.
• Conference and event networks.

Each should be on its own network segment, with firewall rules controlling what can talk to what. Guest devices should not be able to see each other or reach hotel systems. Payment systems have their own security requirements, and the network design must support them. Guest WiFi done safely covers guest isolation in detail.

The guest sign-in experience is part of the design too. Options range from a simple shared password to a portal that links access to a room number or loyalty account. The simpler it is, the fewer calls to the front desk.

Bandwidth and the internet connection

Even a well-designed wireless network is limited by the internet link behind it. Evening peaks, video streaming and events can saturate a connection. Bandwidth management, such as per-device limits or tiers for guests and events, helps share it fairly. Plan the internet capacity, firewall and DHCP address pools for peak occupancy, not average use.

Common complaints and their causes

A worked example

A hotel is renovating its guest floors one at a time. Its corridor access points produce regular evening complaints, especially in rooms at the ends of the corridors. Before the design is set, the surveyor tests two typical rooms on a renovated floor with a temporary access point mounted on the wall where the designer proposes, and measures in the neighbouring rooms, across the corridor and on the floors above and below.

The test shows that an in-room access point serves its own room and the next one well, but the concrete floor slabs block most signal between storeys. The design settles on every second room, alternating sides of the corridor, with a cable to each location added while the rooms are stripped. The meeting level gets its own high-density design, door locks and thermostats move to their own segment, and guest bandwidth limits are set separately for rooms and events. Each renovated floor is validated before guests return to it.

Decisions to make before design

• How guests sign in, and whether access is free, tiered or tied to a room or loyalty account.
• Bandwidth limits for guest rooms, events and staff.
• Which building systems will use the wireless network, and who manages them.
• Who supports guests with connection problems, and at what hours.

How ehZee can help

We design hotel WiFi starting with why guests, staff and systems need the network, and survey rooms, meeting spaces and public areas to plan coverage, capacity and cabling. Our WiFi design and build service covers design, segmentation, guest access, installation and a validation survey, scheduled around occupied floors.

Common questions