The Hospitality Industry

Hotels, hospitals, convention centers, and even airports offer a broad variety of business and entertainment services to their guests. In fact, many of these businesses generate substantial revenue from such value-added services.

For the most part, building owners have not provided broadband access because of the high cost and disruption of wiring existing buildings with Category 5 cabling. So, there is a great need for a cost-effective high-speed solution that does not require threading additional wire throughout a building.

Certainly, MTU owners are not alone in their quest for a solution that does not necessitate an expensive, burdensome rewiring of buildings. Hospitality and MDU buildings have an even greater need. Why? Because, unlike some newer office buildings, most hotels, apartments, and condominiums are not wired for Ethernet. In fact, many are older, historically significant buildings that could be wired only at tremendous cost and challenge. Others have significant accumulations of asbestos or are framed in concrete, making the deployment of Category 5 lines almost impossible.

With LRE, these challenges do not exist. LRE uses the existing telephone-grade wire infrastructure, typically Category 3 or lower-grade cabling. So there is no need to rewire a facility with Ethernet-grade (Category 5) cables, saving the cost of rewiring and the possible loss of revenue while areas are shut down for laying wires. In addition, significant fiber is being deployed in metropolitan areas, making it possible to bring true broadband connectivity to the basement of buildings. The end result: up to 15 Mbps per port can be delivered cost-effectively to locations that traditional Ethernet cannot reach.

Switching units simply need to be installed in the basement, along with the telephone equipment, using 100BASE-TX to uplink to the Internet router or local servers. Then it is a simple “plug-and-play” connection—a PC LAN connection is hooked up to the in-room CPE unit.

High-speed digital service should be able to connect trunk cables to the rings that circle cities. The market term for this technology in the last mile is metropolitan-area network (MAN) applications. Service providers can offer far more advanced services, especially those based on video. A particular beneficiary might be high-definition television (HDTV), a technology that has largely stalled due to unusable bandwidth. HDTV allows service providers to bring a broad portfolio of services directly to television sets. Thus, with LRE, service providers will be able to serve users from both their computers and their TVs.

Telecommuters, SOHO users, and road warriors all need secure access to the company LAN. With LRE coupled with virtual private network (VPN) technology, these users can link to the network securely. As a result, they can enjoy full access to their applications and data, enabling them to work from hotels, small offices, and home offices just as productively as from company headquarters.