The number of hotels with economic chains (such as home, Hantun, 7 days, Jinjiang Stars) is large, wide, single shops small, IT budgets limited, and the host population is dominated by business trips and tourist holidays. These features determine the complex program for deploying WiFi certification systems with economic chains that cannot be replicated in high-end hotels."Cost manageable, simple deployment, wiring convenience, experience compliance"And find a balance. Let's look at the characteristics, challenges and best practices of the economic chain hotel in the WiFi certification system deployment.
WiFi Needs Characteristics of Economic Chain Hotel
The WiFi requirements for the economic chain hotels differ significantly from those of high-end hotels, mainly in terms of cost sensitivity, low housing prices for the economic hotel, limited profit space, relatively tight investment budgets on the WiFi system, requiring the lowest possible overall ownership costs of the programme (TCO), including hardware acquisition costs, software authorization costs, deployment implementation costs and follow-up sustainment costs; and simple deployment, where there are usually no professional IT staff, shop owners or front office staff who need to be able to complete basic system operations and fault checkups, which makes the system's deployment and configurations simple and ideally easy to use."Open the box and you'll be able to use it."or"Zero Configuration Upline"Three: centralized, economic chain hotels are operating in hundreds of thousands of stores. It is not possible for Headquarters to send IT personnel to maintain the system at each door and it is necessary to consolidate, monitor and upgrade all the WiFi systems through a cloud-end central management platform."Unmanned."The fourth is that the hotel has a standard of living, and although expectations for WiFi are not as high as those for the high-end hotels, basic online experience must be safeguarded.——Web browsing, micro-mail video incongruent and video-marking are important factors for hotel selection. Experience failure has a direct impact on the differential rate of assessment and repurchase rates; fifth is compliance line, regardless of hotel slot size, as long as WiFi access services are available, it is necessary to implement the compliance requirements for real name and log retention, including economic hotels, and the system must meet the most basic compliance requirements; sixth is standardization, with serial hotel brand image and service standards being uniform, and WiFi ' s SSID naming, Portal page design, authentication methods, bandwidth strategy etc. need to be consistent across all shops and not be allowed to appear"Every shop."The chaos. These demand characteristics determine that the WiFi certification system for economic chains should be"Cloud management, light deployment, standardization, low cost"Mode.
The advantages of cloud management structures
The WiFi certification system for economic chains is generally based on cloud management architecture: the core management platform of the certification system is deployed at cloud ends (public or brand-owned private clouds), with each door store only having light-weight access devices (AP and gateways) and communicating through the Internet and cloud management platforms. The advantages of the cloud management structure are clear: firstly, centralized, IT managers at Headquarters can see all store WiFi operations on cloud management platforms, including online AP numbers, online terminals, bandwidth usage rates, authentication success rates, failure alerts, etc., without going to site locations in every gate; Second, a unified configuration that Headquarters could define the WiFi configuration of all shops (SSID name, Portal page, authentication method, bandwidth strategy, security rules etc.) in a uniform way across cloud ends, and automatically send out to all stores after configuration changes to ensure consistency of branding standards or different configurations for specific shops or regions; third, remote transport, where when there is a failure at WiFi in one door, IT staff can diagnose and repair remotely through cloud platforms, most problems do not require engineers on site, which significantly reduces the cost of carrying the wiry and downtime recovery time; Four are flexible expansions, where new doors only need to be installed at the door shop with AP and gateways, equipment automatically registered on board the cloud platform after it is connected, headquarters can access the site when the cloud end configuration is completed, and the process does not require professional IT staff to be present on site and opening a store much faster; five are data central, all store certified logs and online data are stored centrally at the cloud end, and Headquarters can perform cross-door data analysis and compliance audits, or interface with branded membership systems and CRM systems to achieve uniform data management and value mining."Skinny terminal, fat cloud": As simple as possible (only wireless access and basic relay), complex authentication, management, and analytical functions are located on cloud ends. This structure significantly reduces hardware costs and transport complexity at doorsides and is well suited to large-scale, distributed deployment scenarios of economic chains. It should be noted that cloud management structures depend on Internet connectivity, and WiFi certification in a door shop may be affected if the doorman's Internet is disrupted and the cloud manager platform cannot communicate with its equipment."Internet-Authorization"Capabilities: When the Internet is interrupted, local gateways at the door shop can provide a cache of authentication strategies and certified user information, and continue to serve certified users, whose accreditation may be limited but not at least completely paralysed throughout WiFi.
Selection of authentication methods
Economic chains are usually given priority in the selection of certification methods."Low cost, good experience, easy deployment"WiFi is one of the most popular ways to certify a hotel with an economic chain: guests clean or click on links, one key to access, one key to operate very simple, experience, without cost-of-sMS, and also guide guests to the hotel brand of the micro-letter public, and recommend fan accumulation for marketing and repurchase. For hotel chains, all the hotels share a brand public name, and residents follow it through any one of them, and become brand fans."One connection, a lifetime fan."The mobile phone code certification is another common method, supplemented by the micro-credit company WiFi: for customers who do not use a micro-letter (e.g. some elderly residents, foreign tourists), it can be certified online via a cell number authentication code. The disadvantage of a mobile phone number certification is that it requires text messaging costs, but for an economic hotel, the cost of a single message is usually acceptable and the cell phone number is also a channel for hotel contacts and members' messages. The use of the PMS system for economic hotels is relatively low, mainly because it has a variety of brands, inconsistent interfaces and high interconnectivity costs, as well as large movement of people in economic hotels, irregularities in front office operations and sometimes difficult to guarantee accuracy of home names and surnames. However, for some medium-to-high-end serial brands (e.g., season, Yado) that have been standardized with PMS, the certification of room numbers is gradually being extended."WeiFi is the main company, and cell phone numbers are supported."The Portal page is designed and managed by Headquarters in a unified fashion, displaying the brand Logo, brand image, membership registration portal, etc., to ensure that all brands are identical. Some chained brands also show on Portal the current sales information (e.g. breakfast preferences, late exits, membership points) and are configured by their head office or doorkeeper in the cloud."A thousand store noodles."Precision marketing.
Bandwidth management and cost control
Economic hotels usually have limited export bandwidth (generally 50 Mbps to 200 Mbps, depending on the size of the store and budget), while the number of terminals is high (a hotel with 100 rooms, possibly 200 to 300 at a peak and online) and bandwidth resources are relatively tight. Therefore, bandwidth management in economic hotels is particularly important, with the goal of guaranteeing basic Internet access for most residents under limited bandwidth. Common bandwidth management strategies include: one is a single bandwidth limit per user (lines 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps, upline 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps), which prevents the overuse of bandwidth by individual occupants from affecting other tenants, and that this restriction is sufficient for basic needs such as page views, micro-mail chats, and tagging videos for most residents; The second is to apply recognition and limit flow, identify application types through DPI (in-depth package detection), restrict or limit the flow of large traffic applications such as P2P downloads (e.g., thunder, BT), online videos (e.g., cool, Aichi culture, tremors) or secure bandwidth for key applications such as web browsing, instant messaging, mail; the third is a peak time strategy, which automatically tightens bandwidth limits during network peak periods from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. (e.g., by reducing the bandwidth per user from 10 Mbps to 5 Mbps), limit the use of large flows and guarantee basic experience; and ease restrictions at low peak hours (e.g. morning to morning) to allow users who need them to enjoy higher speeds; Fourth, a strategy of equitable use, whereby when the overall bandwidth usage exceeds the threshold (e.g. 80 per cent), the system automatically slows down large-flow users and safeguards bandwidth for small-volume users to achieve"All men are equal before the bandwidth."Avoid a few."Bandwidth."The experience affecting most people; fifth, bandwidth elasticity upgrades, with long-range upgrades to export bandwidth or increased bandwidth budgets on cloud ends for shops where there is a higher demand (e.g. in the business area, where customers are mostly business) and without hardware replacement, flexible responses to different door shop needs."Equitable distribution, basic guarantees and restrictions on abuse"The economy is not a necessity."A hundred trillion each."The most profound experience, but it must be assured."Everyone has a free Internet."The basic experience, this is the bottom line of resident satisfaction. A good bandwidth management strategy should be:"Adaptive"The system is able to automatically adjust bandwidth distribution to real-time network conditions without the need for manual intervention by managers, which is particularly important in economic hotels where there are no IT professionals.
Standardized deployment and fast-tracking
The opening of the economic chain hotel is fast, a brand may open dozens of new shops in one year, and WiFi must be deployed at speeds that are consistent with the start-up pace. Standardized deployment is key to achieving rapid opening, including several aspects: first, standardized equipment selection, use of uniform models of AP and gateways for all stores, centralized procurement and pre-positioning of equipment by Headquarters, ready for use when the door gets powered and no live verifier is required; The second is a standardized network structure, with all door shops having a uniform network topup, VLAN division, IP address planning, equipment connectivity, and the shop ' s renovation or weak electrical builders are required to provide paper layout and connection devices according to standard standards without requiring specialized web knowledge; the third is zero configuration on-line, automatic registration of equipment via Internet to cloud management platforms, which automatically match their own doors and configurations with the serial numbers of equipment, automatically send down SSID, Portal pages, authentication methods, bandwidth strategies etc., without manual intervention throughout the process, usually for 3 to 5 minutes from power intubation to uplink; The fourth is a standardized Portal page, where all shops use a centrally designed Portal page template, where the name, address, telephone etc. of the store are automatically filled by cloud and no separate pages are required for each door; the fifth is a standard testing process, which sets standards for receiving and inspection of WiFi systems (e.g. signal coverage, certification success rates, bandwidth compliance rates, etc.), and the opening of doors is preceded by simple acceptances conducted by shop owners or regional managers in accordance with standard checklist, which automatically uploads receipt data to cloud ends and remote review at Headquarters."To get people who don't know IT to put WiFi in place."By standardizing, headquarters can minimize the cost and time of WiFi deployment in single shops, free IT personnel from cumbersome field deployments, focusing on system optimization and data analysis. In addition to standardized deployment, it is also important to standardize the transport: Headquarters develops a uniform down-of-the-pipe process and SLA (service level agreement), doormen encounter WiFi problems are checked according to standard processes (e.g. check equipment power supply, check Internet connection, restart equipment etc.) and unresolved issues are referred through cloudwork order systems to Headquarters for IT support and remote processing at Headquarters. All faults are processed and the results are recorded at cloud ends, forming a knowledge base and continuously improving transport efficiency.
The WiFi certification system for the economic chain hotel is deployed, with a core being achieved at a cost-controllable level"Standardization, cloud management, fast deployment, light lift". Centralize control and remote transport through cloud management structures, achieve low cost and marketing value through micro-credit company WiFi certification, secure basic experience with fine bandwidth management, and start shop quickly through standardized deployment. For economic chains, WiFi is not a system"The flowers are in the top."The luxury of the world."Indispensable."Infrastructure——It has a direct impact on residential occupancy and brand appraisal, as well as on hotel compliance and marketing. The selection of a WiFi certification system that is suitable for the characteristics of an economic chain hotel can help brands to deliver better services at lower cost in intense market competition, and improve operating efficiency and brand competitiveness.