French hotel group Accor has selected Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi products and technology to offer its guests fast and free internet access at its 100 hotels in seven Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.
Accor wanted a solution with 60% fewer access points (APs) to cover the same physical area and without loss in performance to replace its previous system.
Ruckus Wireless, a California-based supplier of advanced wireless systems, won the competition bid against Cisco and HP by providing the best performance in testing conducted by Accor IT staff.
To meet Accor’s needs, Ruckus deployed its Ruckus ZoneFlex 7341, 802.11n mid-range indoor APs featuring Ruckus-patented BeamFlex adaptive antenna technology and ChannelFly.
The ZoneFlex 7341 Smart Wi-Fi APs are centrally managed with Ruckus ZoneDirector 1100 and ZoneDirector 3000 controllers, which provide WLAN-wide network, security, radio frequency (RF) and location management, whereas the ChannelFly selects the best RF channel.
Additionally, Accor deployed Ruckus SmartMesh Networking at select hotels where Ethernet cable to connect individual APs was costly.
The hotels are also using the Wi-Fi networks for their various point-of-sale (POS) tasks at restaurants and to support back office applications used by hotel staff.
Accor Latin America IT director Carla Milovanov said that once the company realised that Wi-Fi was the most important amenity it could provide to guests, it decided not only to improve the Wi-Fi networks across many of its key Latin America properties, but also to offer Wi-Fi for free to attract new guests as well as retain existing customers.
"The results have been incredible. Our latest guest satisfaction surveys show that with the new Wi-Fi network in place, our quality of Wi-Fi service rankings have increased up to 62.5% higher from our previous scores of 5 to as high as 8 now, on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest possible satisfaction ranking," Milovanov added.
