June 10, 2007

How not to organize a public network - Marriott Hotels

From Network World:
Marriott exec shares converged network “horror story”
Hotel chain wants each property to have one network for guests, staff

Neil Schubert is only partly kidding when he calls Marriott International’s move toward a converged network a “horror story.”

“I’m here to tell you a terrifying tale of network design, support and administration,” he said to an audience Thursday at the IDC IT Forum & Expo in Boston. Marriott International runs a variety of hotel chains from the Ramada to the Ritz-Carlton, supporting more than 3,200 properties, 580,000 rooms and 2 million nodes. The so-called horror story began about 10 years ago when the organization began offering broadband access to guests, Schubert said. Things really got bad during an 18-month period in 2005 and 2006 after a TV commercial showed a guest of Marriott’s Courtyard hotels using free high-speed Internet access and video telephone technology.
And the problems:
“This ad came out before we knew about it,” Schubert said. “This brand typically had one DSL circuit into every hotel for 160 customers. It didn’t work real well at first.”

The problem was exacerbated by guests using Slingbox, a device allowing cable customers to view television on their laptops live over the Internet. “It’s a great product as a consumer but terrifying as a network administrator,” Schubert said. “The good news is bandwidth will never be more expensive and it will never be slower than it is today.”
Ouch! Perfect example of some marketing idiot not talking with the IT department. Makes the Hotel look very bad. Posted by DaveH at June 10, 2007 6:53 PM | TrackBack
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