Congres Hotel Van Der Valk Mons

Overview

Whether staying for business or holiday, the Congres Hotel Van Der Valk Mons is optimally situated in the heart of Mons, Belgium. The hotel provides urban travellers with spacious rooms and the luxuries of an in-house restaurant, wellness center, and lounge. With the need to extend the hotel’s high service standards to their wireless offering, the Cisco Meraki solution was deployed by a technology partner throughout the property. The infrastructure provides reliable guest access and network security, as well as on-going updates at no additional cost.

 

Original Networking Challenges

• Brand new hotel, with no dedicated IT staff, required a reliable network solution to provide connectivity for guests and employees
• To stay at the leading-edge of innovation, the business needed a future-proof solution for blanket coverage of rooms and conference areas

Why Cisco Meraki

• The cloud-based dashboard provides central management over security appliance and access points distributed throughout the large hotel
• Fine-grained controls over each of the devices and an advanced feature set provides complete network security
• Auto-mesh failover capabilities provide reliability and on-going connectivity for end users
• Dedicated security radio in each AP continuously scans the environment to identify and protect against security threats

The Deployment

• Installation of nearly 70 access points and an MX80 security appliance was simple with just a single day needed for configurations
• A single SSID for guest access is isolated on a separate VLAN and employees the built-in Meraki DHCP service for complete isolation
• Per-client bandwidth limitations enforced for fair access of the network, while Layer 7 firewall rules block specific applications to ensure appropriate usage
• All traffic from hotel is routed back through a central MX80 Unified Threat Management device with port forwarding enabled

Results

• With Meraki access points deployed over the five hotel floors, guests are reporting positive experiences and reliable connectivity
• Automatic RF optimization, built into the security radio, continuously scans and adapts device settings for the highest performance
• With no on-site IT available, remote configuration and monitoring gives the hotel the ability to provide an enterprise-class network without the hassle
• Over 1,000 users are accessing the network each week on smartphones, laptops, tablets, and more without any problems
• Scalable solution permits the hotel to add new devices, like outdoor IP67 APs, as needed, without having to update or change management style
• New features and firmware updates are automatically downloaded and applied at no additional cost, providing the hotel with a future-proof solution

We need to give our guests a perfect wireless environment in the rooms, as well as in the conference areas. The Meraki platform is very good and is always working, giving us a future-proof and very secure solution.

 

Mathieu Wohrmann

General Manager