Has anyone here worked for a hotel that hosted conferences etc?

tdean

and i dont mean as the cleanup crew! i was just hoping you could give me some insight as to what the network topologies are typically like for places like that. they have wired and wireless infrastructure, im guessing the conference room is separate from the rest of the network. DMZ? or separate vlan? anyone have any insight?

Devilsbane

Your best bet would probably be to select the hotel you wanted and call them up to ask. I'm sure there are some hotels who just plug a wap into the line coming in and leave it and there are probably some with massive infrastructures.

ajmatson

I worked for a smaller hotel with 131 rooms and 1400 sq feet of meeting space. Our whole hotel was wireless run by Speakeasy. There was a DSL router fed into a Cisco 1841 (which I got when they took it out of the loop right before I left ) then routed into a 3550 switch with PoE. From the switch there was 8 Cisco WLAN access points spread through the building. Maybe not the most efficient but it worked. The actual hotel network was separate from the wireless access.

Forsaken_GA

im not sure how other conferences handle their setup, but I worked for a company that was the primary sponsor of a trade show, and we did our own network setup. We got a temporary circuit dropped into the room we were using and deployed our own gear, we wanted to make absolutely certain that non-attendees weren't able to intercept any traffic

mark_s0

I don't actually work in a hotel but we have hotel-like facilities. We have 6/7 teaching rooms with about 14 breakout rooms and about 60 hotel bedrooms.
We have a wireless and wired network for these areas each having their own vlan plus a private vlan for the staff wired network.
We run around 24 access points around the building to cover the wireless access.

Currently all networks, wired or wireless, are travelling over the same WAN connection although we're hoping to separate this by having the conference vlans on a separate WAN connection.

I would also be interested in hearing how others are set up.

bwcarty

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

im not sure how other conferences handle their setup, but I worked for a company that was the primary sponsor of a trade show, and we did our own network setup. We got a temporary circuit dropped into the room we were using and deployed our own gear, we wanted to make absolutely certain that non-attendees weren't able to intercept any traffic

My former company had an annual 4 day conference hosted at large convention hotel, and we would do the same thing. We ordered a dedicated circuit from the carrier and connected everything using our own equipment. This took a lot of cooperation on the part of the hotel, and because we used the same hotel year after year, we had more access to the hotel's telecom rooms than a typical company would be able to get.

As far as the hotel's service went, everything was managed by the extremely overpriced STSN/iBAHN. They did supposedly have dedicated circuits available for lease for conferences, but I didn't bother to see if they were physically isolated from the rest of the hotel's network.