REPORT FROM THE U.S.—The installation of fiber cabling to hotel guestrooms is a growing trend in the industry, but hoteliers need to know if and when it’s the right time to switch from copper to fiber cables, sources said.
“At this time, the benefit of running fiber depends on the hotel,” Martin Thornros, principal at tech consultancy firm Convergent Services, said. “If you follow hotel technology, there are a lot of things that sound really good, but there’s more sex appeal than there is substance behind it.”
Thornros said deciding whether or not fiber cables would benefit a property is a tough decision, and there’s no set requirement when it comes to the type of hotels that would benefit from going from copper to fiber cables.
“(For) a smaller, single (hotel,) it’s probably unlikely that fiber makes sense at this point,” he said. “There are some single box buildings where fiber makes sense because of the layout of the hotel, especially in urban areas like New York City where you have some buildings that might be very, very skinny with four or five rooms on each floor, it may very well make sense to use fiber.
“If you look at a large distributed resort with lots of buildings, with lots of physical land, where it’s spread out, fiber probably makes all the sense in the world.”
Copper cabling still works in hotels if the type of copper used is up to date, Thornros said.
“If you’re running on a Cat3 cable plan, you need to upgrade,” he said. “But if you are running on a Cat6 cable plan today, I would suggest that there is very, very, very few times where you should be upgrading the cable plan.”
Fiber to the room
A fiber cable is used as the backbone in most hotels, sources said, but hoteliers now are exploring ways to benefit from installing fiber cables to guestrooms.
“The newer approach is the fiber-to-the-room design,” said David Heckaman, VP of technology at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. He said that is “more or less taking out all of the copper infrastructure that’s in the riser and in the horizontal, and then only putting copper in the last few feet from the network endpoint to the few locations in the room that would have some sort of (network) device.”
Nelson Garrido, senior VP of information technology at Thayer Lodging Group, said it’s important for hoteliers to understand that copper cabling still is needed at the ends of fiber cables going to guestrooms. Owners should consider this fact when putting a cost analysis together.
“The biggest obstacle (of fiber to the room) is, once you get to the room, you still have to go down to some kind of copper to get the devices in the room,” he said. “So you’ll get the advantage of getting more bandwidth … But the other piece that people forget sometimes is that at some point, (the fiber cable) has to come back down to copper to connect to devices that exist in the rooms.”
Sources said it’s hard to pinpoint the cost of installing fiber to the room because it depends on whether or not it’s a new build or an existing hotel and if the property is going through minor renovations or a complete gutting.
“Nowadays, fiber is almost cheaper to install and terminate than it was five years ago, or even four,” Heckaman said. “In the copper world, it’s gone from Cat5 to (Cat6,) and that’s looking at Cat8, so along those lines, each time that’s changed, tolerances get tighter, and so the cost becomes harder and more costly to terminate the copper cables.
“When I started doing hotel construction, (fiber) used to be ungodly expensive. It was a super-special skill and there was only one guy who could do it because he had special training.”
Heckaman said the installation of fiber cables is much easier today than it was four or five years ago when the technology was first introduced.
“Now it’s just a little kit, and it takes maybe 30 seconds or so to terminate,” he said. “You can actually order (the cables) pre-terminated at either both ends or at one end, and especially at locations where you have union labor or really high labor costs, the savings by ordering pre-terminated are dramatic. Most of the cost nowadays is the termination expense, not the actual cable itself.”
Future-proofing infrastructure
The type of fiber cabling used in hotels has changed over the years, which allows for increased bandwidth.
“You should only be running single-mode fiber outside of the main computer room, even in non-hospitality installation,” Heckaman said. “Nowadays, multimode is really just used for short runs within a computer or server room facility, and anything that really has any distance to it is being run as a single-mode fiber, and the reason for it is you can go much further distances with a higher bandwidth.”
Heckaman said some technologies that are used in hotels will only work on single-mode fiber cables.
Also, he said installing fiber cables is also a smart way to future-proof a hotel’s IT infrastructure.
“You can change out the equipment at the end in either the guestroom or the distribution closet or in the computer room, but change in the infrastructure doesn’t happen very often,” he said. “It’s either disruptive to the operations, and it’s obviously very difficult from a cost standpoint to get those cables run, so what you want to do is put in an infrastructure that will last a long time with the logic that you’re going to change the active component or the endpoint.
“You may change (endpoints) (three or four times,) but if you put in the fiber infrastructure, then you can rest assured that over time, you may change the endpoints out a couple times, but you don’t have to worry about that infrastructure not being able to handle it.”