Orizzonte Village Resort Builds a Green All-Optical Campus with a Huawei Solution

Renowned for its beautiful landscapes and rolling vineyards, including over 120 listed nature reserves, central Italy's Tuscany is also revered for its influential artistic and cultural legacy. Indeed, the region is widely regarded as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, and many influential historical figures, from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo and Dante Alighieri, have called Tuscany home. All of this is, of course, a magnet for tourists.

Covering an area of 18 hectares, including the beautiful Gulf of Baratti and the golden Perelli, Cala Violina, and Torre Mozza beaches, Orizzonte Village is a Tuscan tourist resort that attracts a large number of visitors every year. In fact, during the peak summer season, the village accommodates an average of 2000 tourists every single day.

With many traveling from far and wide, visitors well-used to relying on their digital devices now expect remote office, video calling, and Internet browsing services all of the time. In order to better meet this demand, as well as improve the overall user experience, Orizzonte's executives have long emphasized the importance of constructing advanced Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, with a key focus on making both services and their management intelligent, facilitating quick and efficient information sharing.

As Giampaolo Pioli, the resort's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) highlighted, the site's legacy campus infrastructure involved multiple independent networks for Internet, TV, and telephone access. With the demand for video calls, high-speed Wi-Fi, and intelligent hotel services rapidly growing, network maintenance, upgrades, and capacity expansion were becoming increasingly difficult. In addition, the legacy infrastructure suffered from poor stability due to the insufficient bandwidth provided by copper lines — which were also, by the way, environmentally harmful — adversely impacting the user experience.

None of this sat well with the resort's ambitions for Tuscany's green future, so three objectives were identified as key for the intelligent development of the village.

• The first aimed to build a green and eco-friendly campus network. To this end, a new overall network solution was required, one with simplified architecture and advanced technologies, in order to achieve sustainable development.

• A multi-service integrated bearer network was also necessary. The resort wanted a new campus network that could provide network access for multiple services through various terminals such as mobile phones, landlines, and information backhaul devices.

• Finally, an intelligent campus network was deemed essential. The village has a wide coverage area and over 600 rooms. Any new network had to provide high-speed and reliable network access, even during seasonal peaks. In addition, with a growing number of terminals and ever higher service requirements, new network architecture needed to be future-proofed, supporting smooth evolution to match any future development needs.

In 2021, Orizzonte Village finally began using Huawei's Fiber To The Office (FTTO) All-Optical Campus Solution, to construct sustainable campus network infrastructure.

Green Technological Innovation

Huawei's FTTO Solution deploys fiber cables across the entire campus network. These cables offer four times longer service life than traditional network cables, with no need for re-cabling for the next 30 years. The solution also uses simplified two-layer architecture and replaces active aggregation switches with passive optical splitters, making the new network more environmentally friendly than the legacy solution. This also cuts required Extra Low Voltage (ELV) room space by 90%, reducing power consumption by 60%. Such technological innovation helps achieve the sustainable development the resort was searching for.

Multi-Network Convergence and Simplified O&M

Huawei's FTTO Solution deploys fiber to individual rooms and provides Internet access, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) through Optical Network Units (ONUs), allowing multiple services — including information backhaul — to be carried over a single network. This helps achieve unified, network-wide management. In addition, ONUs feature plug-and-play deployment and services can be recovered immediately should a faulty device need to be replaced.

Tarma , Customer Service Director of Orizzonte Village, noted that Huawei's FTTO Solution allows an engineer to deploy and maintain the all-optical network remotely, significantly improving maintenance efficiency.

High-Speed Access and Flexible Evolution

A massive number of access devices require high bandwidth in peak seasons. In Huawei's FTTO Solution, ONUs are deployed close to users. Now, according to Tarma, tourists enjoy a premium experience with seamless access to the gigabit network anytime, anywhere.

In addition, as intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) applications become more prominent in Orizzonte Village, even higher bandwidth requirements are being placed on the network. This is where fiber cables come in, breaking the bandwidth and distance limitations of traditional cables. The FTTO Solution uses simplified point-to-multipoint architecture without the need for re-cabling. The network supports flexible capacity expansion and smooth bandwidth upgrade from Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) to 10 GPON and even 50 GPON. Put simply, the solution not only protects existing investments, it also supports long-term development.

Huawei's FTTO All-Optical Campus Solution is helping Orizzonte Village achieve sustainable development through network transformation. And with many other large resorts and hotels spread across the world, it can serve as a showcase of how to truly build a green and all-optical campus in the hospitality industry, all through digital transformation.

Huawei's FTTO all-optical campus solution uses an innovative two-layer network architecture and supports multi-network convergence. Based on passive optical network transmission, this solution is green and energy-saving, and reduces 6500+ kg of carbon dioxide emission each year, equivalent to planting 300 trees. Now our tourists can easily access the Internet anytime and anywhere in the village with premium experience.