Huawei Helps Hangzhou Westbrook Offer Unparalleled Network Experiences

Background

Hangzhou Westbrook Resort, a sprawling complex of luxury shops and accommodations adjacent to Xixi National Wetland Park, has been called “heaven on earth.” With numerous top hotels, the resort offers a variety of leisure activities as well as business and conference facilities. A focal point is the National Wetland Museum of China, which highlights the local Xixi environment and recreates typical wetland landscapes across the globe. Rounding out the resort’s offerings are international clubs, boutique shopping streets, serviced apartments, hotel room investment properties, and convenient tourism services. A popular destination for people from around the world, Hangzhou welcomes tens of millions of visitors each year.

Challenges

Hangzhou Westbrook Resort is a huge state-of-the-art development that requires Wi-Fi coverage in all corners of the office area and shopping streets, as well as easy management and maintenance. Several factors pose challenges to network planning, development, management, and O&M:

The resort is a complex environment with many buildings and artificial hills. Careful network planning is required to ensure complete coverage.

The resort has no professional network O&M team, so the Wi-Fi network needed a unified, simple management and maintenance platform that enables general computing O&M personnel to handle network issues.

The resort includes multiple businesses that have their own networks, as well as office networks operated by the resort itself. Additionally, the resort’s many shops need support for marketing and promotion.

Solution

Huawei’s CloudCampus Solution was chosen as the ideal way to provide Wi-Fi coverage for Hangzhou Westbrook Resort. For the many business networks within the resort, CloudCampus can achieve full-lifecycle management. The solution achieves simplified wireless network management and intelligent O&M. Advanced software functions promote the digitalization of commerce and tourism, and help meet future network development trends.

Professional online network planning eliminates Wi-Fi blind spots

One of the most-innovative features of the solution is its simplified deployment, which greatly reduces the time needed to set up the network. Using traditional on-site surveys, it would have taken about a day to plan the Wi-Fi network for a single shop in Westbrook Resort. Thus, just the shops in the resort would have taken a month for planning, and they would still likely have blind spots and interference.

In contrast, Huawei’s CloudCampus Solution has an online cloud-based planner that requires no on-site surveys. Just using the site drawings, the solution makes it practical to plan a shop’s Wi-Fi coverage in 2 hours. Based on Huawei’s 30 years of experience in network planning, a model library enables the online cloud-based planner to identify possible obstructions and formulate effective network planning strategies. This approach shortens network construction by 30 percent. One year after network construction, network-related complaints are 75 percent fewer than those in other commercial complexes in China.

Huawei professional Cloud-Based WLAN Planner

In addition to cloud-based network planning, the solution includes a cloud management platform that centrally manages devices across the network. This platform integrates a Geographical Information System (GIS) map that shows device locations for easier management. Staff with little networking knowledge can easily log in to the cloud management platform and see the network status. The platform’s remote Preventive Maintenance Inspection (PMI) reduces cost by 90 percent compared with traditional on-site PMI and significantly improves overall efficiency.

Centralized management of devices

Precise information query

Based on the open RESTful architecture of Huawei’s CloudCampus Solution, Hangzhou Westbrook Resort has integrated the Minrong Big Data Analytics Platform with the network. This platform implements customer flow analysis using inputs from the use of the wireless network by smartphone users. The platform also creates customer profiles based on the gender, age, and location of visitors. This information helps guide shops to identify potential customers and develop effective marketing strategies.

User identification with directional probes

Precision marketing

Benefits

Huawei’s CloudCampus Solution provides a world-class Wi-Fi experience for both visitors and businesses in Hangzhou Westbrook Resort. The solution also provides an efficient O&M platform that enables maintenance by non-network-specialist O&M personnel. According to statistics, the number of O&M engineers at Hangzhou Westbrook Resort is only half the industry average, yet they also handle the network O&M workload. Hangzhou Westbrook Resort is well on its way to providing the world’s tourists with a comprehensive range of services based on this simple network.