Ramada hotel & suites chooses industry leader TP-Link for wireless service deployments

Customer Profile
Customer Name: Ramada Hotel & Suites
Industry: Hospitality
Location: Ajman, UAE
Year of Project: 2017

BACKGROUND

Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman is located on Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Street, in the centre of the main city of Ajman. With 388 rooms, it offers studio rooms as well as one bedroom and two bedroom suites. Providing a warm, welcoming retreat, the hotel is the ideal place to conduct business or perfect base to organise excursions to the UAE’s many attractions.

CHALLENGE

Prior to working with TP-Link, Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman experienced several ongoing issues with its old wireless network including loss of network signal, weak signal or disconnection,strained network capacity, inefficient network management,and the mismatch between the industrial design of the wireless access points and the design of the hotel. After evaluation and assessing the whole set-up, Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman realised it was time to implement a new wireless network.

The hotel’s main challenge was the thick concrete walls used to partition its rooms. This inability presented a problem to install dedicated access points in every room, since the management preferred access points only in corridors and need to cover studio rooms as well as one bedroom and two bedroom suites. This presented several difficulties, including signal penetration and strength at each and every corner of the hotel, as well as load balancing of clients between the access points to ensure that no
client is dropped or lost when connected to the network.

SOLUTION

To address these challenges and provide a robust WiFi signal in all rooms for all guests, Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman management sought to deploy a wireless network that had to fulfil the following demands in terms of coverage, capacity, reliability and centralised management. To address these challenges and provide a robust WiFi solution for the hotel, the TP-Link technical team performed a wireless survey, wireless heat map and the POC for three weeks. It was concluded that the Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman could provide seamless wireless coverage for all the guest rooms and facilities using 170 units of Ceiling Mount Access Points EAP 225 inside the rooms and keep the AP’s only in the corridors. The AC1200 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Ceiling Mount Access Point EAP225 offers simultaneous 300Mbps on 2.4GHz and 867Mbps on 5GHz totals 1200Mbps Wi-Fi speeds, Free EAP Controller Software which lets administrators easily manage hundreds of EAPs and supports power over Ethernet (802.3af) for convenient and affordable installation. In addition, the captive portal provides a convenient method for guest authentication, while band Steering Automatically moves dual band devices onto the wider 5GHz band for faster connections.

BUSINESS RESULTS

The Ramada Hotel and Suites Ajman Hotel Management and customers were extremely satisfied with the TP-Link WiFi solution, as well as management features that allow IT administrators to centrally manage the network, generate temporary guest tokens, load balance the clients and limit access rights. This was all performed through the free Auranet Controller Software, which helped administrators to specifically manage the hotel’s WiFi network. Hotel guests are extremely happy to browse over a very fast 802.11ac WiFi network to enjoy Internet-based entertainment, such as HD movies, games and video chats, without compromising
WiFi stability or security.