Case Study: Upgrading Hotel Wi-Fi for International Brand Compliance

A 178-room Belfast city-centre hotel needed to replace an end-of-life corridor-based wireless system with a brand-compliant network capable of supporting modern guest and operational demands. Unlike a conversion or refurbishment project, this was an upgrade inside an established hotel that remained open, occupied and fully operational throughout.

Connected Hospitality surveyed, designed and delivered the new Wi-Fi and network infrastructure in just six working days. The existing platform remained live during the migration, allowing guestrooms and shared areas to move onto the new service in a controlled sequence without interrupting guest Wi-Fi or the hotel’s critical operational systems.

The challenge: an end-of-life corridor-based Wi-Fi design

The legacy system relied on access points positioned in guest corridors. Corridor-based designs can appear convenient because fewer guestrooms need to be accessed during installation, but walls, doors, bathrooms, mirrors and other building materials attenuate the signal before it reaches the devices guests actually use. The result can be acceptable readings in the corridor but inconsistent performance beside the bed, desk or television.

The existing equipment had also reached end of life. Continuing to operate it would have increased support and security risk while doing nothing to correct the underlying RF design. The hotel therefore needed more than a like-for-like hardware replacement: it required a new design built around guestroom coverage, capacity, brand requirements and the operational systems sharing the infrastructure.

The work had to take place without closing rooms for extended periods or disrupting reception, card payments, television services and day-to-day hotel operations. With only six working days available, room access, cabling, configuration, testing and cutover all needed to be planned as parts of one coordinated migration.

Survey, design and approval before deployment

Connected Hospitality completed a predictive wireless design and an on-site survey before finalising the network architecture and Bill of Materials. This allowed the deployment team to understand the building, confirm the proposed access-point positions and identify where the existing cabling could be retained.

Twenty new cable runs were installed where the design required additional connectivity. Reusing suitable infrastructure elsewhere reduced cost and disruption, but only after it had been assessed against the new solution. This avoided the common mistake of allowing old cable locations to dictate the new wireless design.

Connected Hospitality also managed the technical submissions, approval process and compliance requirements for the international hotel brand. The design therefore entered deployment with the required architecture, equipment, configuration and validation criteria already understood by the project team and the hotel.

Room-level coverage with Meraki wallplate access points

The new guestroom design used one Cisco Meraki MR36H wallplate access point for every two rooms. Positioning wireless closer to the guest reduces the number of walls the signal must pass through and creates more predictable room-level coverage than a corridor-only design.

The wider design also covered the bar, lobby, breakfast area, restaurant, gym, conference space, lift areas, guest corridors and all guestrooms. These areas were treated according to their layout and expected usage rather than assuming that one access-point type or spacing rule would work everywhere.

Post-installation validation confirmed at least −65 dBm received signal strength and 30 dB signal-to-noise ratio across all tested guest areas. Signal strength shows whether a client can hear the network; SNR shows how clearly it can distinguish that signal from background noise and interference. Both measures matter when assessing whether Wi-Fi is likely to remain stable in real use.

Bandwidth caps were applied in line with the brand standard. Used correctly, these controls promote a fair and consistent service by stopping a small number of devices from consuming disproportionate capacity. They form part of the complete guest-experience design rather than acting as a substitute for adequate internet bandwidth or properly engineered Wi-Fi.

A six-day migration with no service interruption

The existing wireless system remained operational while the new environment was installed, configured and tested. Areas were migrated in a controlled sequence, preventing the hotel from becoming dependent on an incomplete network and giving the project team a clear fallback until each cutover had been verified.

Connected Hospitality worked closely with the franchisee’s IT manager and the hotel team to coordinate access to 178 occupied guestrooms. Daily sequencing took account of guest movements, housekeeping, room status and operational priorities. This cooperation allowed engineers to work efficiently without treating the hotel like an empty construction site.

The complete hotel Wi-Fi upgrade was delivered in six working days. The staged approach kept the original network available until the relevant services were ready to move, and the hotel experienced no service interruption during the cutover. This was a planned operational outcome, not simply a fortunate consequence of working quickly.

More than Wi-Fi: rebuilding the supporting network

The access points were only one part of the project. Connected Hospitality installed and configured the switching and firewalls that carry, control and protect traffic across the property. UPS power protection was installed for all network switches, helping the infrastructure withstand short power disturbances and shut down more safely during a longer outage.

The hotel’s television platform was migrated onto the new network alongside payment terminals, chip-and-PIN devices, staff equipment and connected gym machines. The wireless service was also integrated with the brand-mandated property-management system according to the approved design.

Guest, administration and payment traffic were separated using VLANs and firewall policies. This prevented unrelated systems from sharing one broad network and isolated payment services to support the hotel’s PCI DSS responsibilities. Segmentation also made the environment easier to manage because access could be defined around what each device or service genuinely needed.

This complete-infrastructure approach is central to Connected Hospitality’s network and connectivity services. A modern access point cannot compensate for unsuitable cabling, overloaded switches, poor firewall policy or an unmanaged mix of operational devices.

Validation, brand audit and support handover

After installation and configuration, Connected Hospitality completed on-site validation against the agreed design targets. The finished network passed the hotel brand’s compliance audit, confirming that the upgraded environment met the required technical standard.

The project was then handed into the agreed managed-support arrangement with the deployment records and configuration needed for ongoing operation. A structured handover matters because successful installation is only the beginning of a hotel network’s life: monitoring, fault ownership, firmware management and escalation processes determine how effectively it is supported thereafter.

The result was not produced by exchanging old access points for newer ones in the same locations. It came from surveying the building, designing around the rooms and guest spaces, upgrading the supporting network, controlling the migration and validating the completed RF environment.

That distinction is explored further in our article on why many Wi-Fi upgrades fail to improve Wi-Fi. Hardware matters, but placement, configuration, interference, switching, security and support determine the experience delivered to the guest.