Huawei Solution Drives Network Transformation of Hotusa

Background

Founded in 1977 through the initiative of a hotel managers group in Barcelona, Hotusa delivers business and marketing services for independent hotels. At present, Hotusa serves over 2,500 hotels in 48 different countries. It is the largest hotel consortium in Europe.

The original intention of Hotusa was to provide a unified platform for small hotels and groups, helping them enhance competitiveness in the international market. For this hotel platform, unified marketing, agent, membership, quality, and supply systems were needed.

Challenges

To support the operation of the platform, a network environment in which everyone could access the Internet was required. In Hotusa Group’s 2,500 hotels, some hotels had no Wi-Fi coverage, while others suffered from poor Wi-Fi coverage, causing unsatisfactory user experience. These hotels often received customer complaints, which seriously deteriorated their overall competitiveness. In addition, the network quality made it difficult to effectively support Hotusa’s goals of a unified platform. To improve Wi-Fi experience and customer satisfaction, Hotusa decided to upgrade the Wi-Fi networks in its subordinate hotels.

Most Hotusa hotels used indoor settled Access Points (APs), while a small number of hotels used wall plate APs. Settled APs were usually installed along corridors, and Wi-Fi signals needed to penetrate walls, causing serious signal loss. In addition, the hotels’ use of acoustic insulation materials, such as marble tiles, increased the attenuation of wireless signals and resulted in poor indoor Wi-Fi performance. Wall plate APs were typically installed indoors, and signals did not need to penetrate walls, ensuring good in-room reception and bandwidth; however, this solution did not support unified management of APs. Faults could not be promptly located in the case of network failures. In addition, since each room needed to deploy an AP, it was a major challenge for hotel network personnel to manage such a large number of APs.

Solution

Taking into account the high room density and complex wall structure of Hotusa hotels, Huawei proposed its Agile Distributed Wi-Fi Solution to address signal issues. In this solution, Remote Units (RUs) are deployed in rooms, which provides pervasive indoor signal coverage. Moreover, only a central AP needs to be managed, reducing the number of managed nodes by over 90 percent and saving management and network construction costs for Hotusa.

The firewall grants customers a satisfying Wi-Fi experience and comprehensive security protection. Internally, the firewall secures the information assets of the hotel through accurate access control and attack defense. Externally, the firewall controls malicious websites to guarantee Internet access security for customers so that they can enjoy high-quality and secure Internet access services during their stay in the hotel.

Benefits

After the upgrade to the Huawei Wi-Fi network, Hotusa’s guests are now able to connect to fast, secure, uninterrupted wireless services, whether in rooms, halls, or any corner of the hotels. Network management personnel can easily perform unified network management and operation and maintenance and monitor AP performance, power consumption, and channel usage in real time, ensuring rapid fault location. Huawei’s Agile Distributed Wi-Fi Solution created a unified management network that supports Hotusa’s goal of constructing a marketing platform. The solution also ensures the lowest total cost of ownership and the highest return on IT investment, which enhances Hotusa’s successful network transformation.