Shenzhen: broadband booms in hotel rooms - Advertisement

Telecommunications International, August, 2002 by Ann Wang

When Bill Gates came to stay in Shenzhen, China's booming hitech city which lies adjacent to Hong Kong, he stayed in the Shenzhen Wuzhou Guest House. The Wuzhou is a five star hotel, with all the facilities that global business leaders would expect. It has several excellent restaurants, a gym, a pool and a business centre and an international conference hall. It also offers high speed Internet access from every one of its 156 rooms.

This is good news for the guests, and also offers an extra revenue stream for the hotel. But setting up high speed access for so many rooms and keeping track of the billing is not easy. Luckily for the Wuzhou, the burden of managing this is carried by Shenzhen Telecom.

To provide the service, Shenzhen Telecom uses a platform called IP Hotel, developed by Huawei Technologies. IP Hotel interfaces with the hotel's management system, so that when guests check into their rooms their broadband access and telephone are automatically activated by the IP Hotel platform. The IP Hotel platform can also keep track of minibar use, provide information on room status (i.e. whether the room is occupied, and whether it has been cleaned) and provide multi-lingual wake-up calls, or prompt the hotel's switchboard operator to give a personal wake-up call.

Mr Zong Ze Bin, vice director of Shenzhen Telecom's marketing and management department, explains that the IP Hotel platform allows his company to add value to broadband applications. "Of course, there are plenty of business customers who want high speed access, but the IP Hotel platform offers a vertical sector-specific set of applications, which is invaluable to customers in that industry. If you want to deliver added value in a specific industry sector, you really have to understand the IT and business process issues in that sector." Zong explains that there are four major hotel management systems in use by top flight hotels in Shenzhen. In order to be successful in rolling out the IP Hotel service, Shenzhen Telecom had to demonstrate that its platform integrated seamlessly with all four of them.

"That's where Huawei really excelled," explains Ann Tang, senior engineer with Shenzhen Telecom. "They realised from the outset that we needed a complete solution, not just a load of boxes." The result is five star hotels use the IP Hotel Solution from Shenzhen Telecom, as do many four star hotels. "In a highly competitive market, IP Hotel has made Shenzhen Telecom the leader in the provision of broadband services to the hotel sector," explains Tang.

In the access network, there are two principal methods of connecting hotel rooms to broadband services. In the first method, ADSL modems connect hotel rooms to Huawei Technologies' SmartAX MA5100 multi-service access platform. In the second method, Huawei's 2403F LAN switches are used to serve groups of 24 rooms at 10Mbit/s. Upstream, these connect to SmartAX MA5200 series IP-based broadband remote access servers (B-RASs) at 100 Mbit/s.

The access network links back to the IP Hotel Platform, housed on Shenzhen Telecom's premises. The telecom company also manages a portal server for its hotel clients. The hotel portal is the first page that guests will see when they log on to the Internet, and can be used to give hotel and tourist information, account details and access to the wider Internet.

Shenzhen Telecom's broadband revenues are growing at over 100% per year, and currently represent about 5% of the company's total revenues.

Shenzhen Telecom has over 400 business customers, many of whom are using MPLS VPN services to connect sites within the Shenzhen area.

Tang expects the neighbouring telco in Guangdong province to introduce MPLS VPNs soon, which will allow customers to link securely between other cities and Shenzhen.

Meanwhile, flushed with the success of Huawei's IP Hotel platform, Zong and his team are busy looking at more vertical applications. "There are lots of things we could do," he says. "The challenge is to prioritise them, develop them and then make them work with 100% reliability." No doubt Huawei's software development teams will be playing a key role in Zong's next vertical sector play.