314 rooms, 21 floors, and coverage that holds in the lift

In short. A hotel with 314 rooms on 21 floors. One fibre coming in from the
street, a 10Gbit backbone up through the building, 42 switches spread across the risers and 130
access points. Built while the hotel stayed open. The test was not the speed test in the lobby.
The test was a full house on a Friday night.

The brief: a guest should never have to think about the network

Nobody checks in and hopes for good WiFi. They assume it, the way they assume hot water. So the
brief was not a number of megabits. It was that a guest walking from the lift to room 1704, opening
a laptop and joining a video call should never once wonder whether it is the hotel or their
employer. That sounds soft. It is the hardest specification there is, because it has to hold at
three in the afternoon when the building is empty and at eight in the evening when it is not.

From fibre at the street to an access point on every floor

It starts outside. Fibre comes in from the street to the main technical room, and from there a
10Gbit backbone runs up the risers. Every floor gets its own switch, and every switch feeds the
access points on that floor over the same cable that powers them. No adapters in corridors, no
socket hunting behind a fire door. If a floor has a problem, it is one floor.

Why 42 switches and not one large one

One large switch in the basement is cheaper on paper and shorter to install. It also means that
every cable in the building has to reach the basement, and copper stops working properly past 90
metres. In a 21-floor building you lose that argument on the third floor. The other reason is
duller and more important: one switch is one thing that can fail, and it takes 314 rooms with it.
Forty-two switches means a failure is a floor, not a hotel.

The 90-metre limit catches out foreign specifications regularly. A drawing from abroad often
says 300 feet, and 300 feet is 91.4 metres. That is not the same number, and the difference shows
up as a link that trains at a lower speed on a warm afternoon and works fine when the engineer
comes to look at it.

The places nobody measures: the lift, the stairwell, the far end of the corridor

Coverage plans are drawn on floor plans, and floor plans are honest about walls and silent about
everything else. A lift shaft is a steel tube. A fire door is a slab of metal with a closer on it.
The far end of a corridor is where the last access point stops being generous. Those are exactly
the places a guest stands when they are already annoyed: waiting for the lift, dragging a suitcase,
looking for room 2109.

So we measured there. Not on the plan, in the building, with a full trolley and a room list, and
we moved points where the measurement disagreed with the drawing. It disagreed more than once.

Doing it while the hotel stays open

The rooms were done one at a time, around the cleaning schedule. A room comes free, the cabling
is terminated, the room goes back into service the same day. Nobody sleeps in a room with a hole in
the wall. This is the part that decides how long a project like this takes, and it is the part that
almost never appears in a plan: not the cabling, but the choreography around housekeeping.

Re-patching a live cabinet is the same discipline in miniature. Every cord that moves is a room
that goes dark for a minute, so it is done slowly, one cord at a time, with the labels checked
before anything is pulled. Slow is the fast way here.

What we would tell any hotelier planning this

Three things, in this order. Get the backbone right before you argue about access points, because
no amount of wireless fixes a thin uplink. Assume a full house, not an average one, because average
occupancy is not when your reputation is decided. And ask for the measurement afterwards in writing,
per room and per floor, so that six months later a complaint can be checked against a number instead
of a memory.

The way we build it, that handover is part of the job: patched, labelled, photographed. If you
want to see how we approach hotel networks in general rather than this one building, that is
on our business WiFi page. The platform this runs
on is managed centrally, which is why a
change on floor 17 does not need a van. And there is
more of our work in the Netherlands if you would like to see
what else we have built here.