By Greg Njjar
Excerpt:
The emergence of Amazon has increased customer expectations across every industry and is changing hospitality best practices for providing a better guest experience. Now, hotels must look beyond basic amenities and offer a streamlined, consistent customer experience only possible with a large scale roll out of advanced technologies. This can range from mobile applications that enable fast check-in to mobile room keys and hotel software used for video surveillance and data analytics. These applications require a robust and secure connectivity infrastructure that solutions such as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) is equipped to handle. CBRS is a private LTE cellular band that can be lightly licensed or shared amongst the public or enterprises with the help of in-building connectivity devices such as distributed antenna systems (DAS), which are dispersed across floors of a hotel to amplify cellular signals.
Providing this new wave of offerings to hotel guests requires blanket consistency across the entire building, which can’t be accomplished using WiFi alone. WiFi is declining as users struggle to connect or experience a slow connection. As a result, guests may opt to use their own cell phone service, leaving some without access to smart hotel amenities. CBRS, unlike WiFi, takes consumer decisions out of the connectivity equation as guests automatically opt into the secure service through proximity. Management can’t assume every guest will connect to WiFi when they arrive, providing an opportunity to install CBRS enabled systems to power their wireless services.
