Thai telco True Corp and ZTE have revealed details on their collaboration to deploy a ‘fiber to the room’ (FTTR) optical Wi-Fi solution for Wyndham Royal Lee Phuket that provides gigabit connections for every room in the hotel.
Wyndham Royal Lee Phuket is a serviced-apartment-style hotel resort community that found its broadband infrastructure increasingly unable to handle the demands of guests as smart-home devices and high-bandwidth apps like HD video and gaming became more popular.
The resort’s broadband network used a VDSL 100 Mbps bandwidth access solution, with one Wi-Fi gateway for every 2-3 rooms. The result was poor coverage, unstable connections and actual data speeds of less than 10 Mbps per room, which in turn resulted in frequent guest complaints.
As Wyndham Royal Lee Phuket underwent refurbishment earlier this year, it collaborated with True Corp and ZTE to replace the VDSL infrastructure with True Online's broadband access service and ZTE's FTTR solution. The solution employs a combination of optical fiber and Wi-Fi 6 technology to remove the performance constraints of traditional Ethernet cable and prevent speed degradation.
After True and ZTE successfully trialled the FTTR solution, they installed one main Optical Network Terminal (ONT) and 26 room ONTs on each floor, so that every room had its own independent ONT. ZTE installed its FTTR devices at strategic locations to guarantee full Wi-Fi 6 signal strength in every corner of the rooms. An in-house smart roaming algorithm enables seamless millisecond-level roaming handover as guests move about in the building.
Once the system was in place, True Online provided 2 Gbps packages, enabling gigabit speeds for each room.
True and ZTE are billing it as the first FTTR community to be deployed in Thailand.
ZTE says the FTTR solution has “transformed the Internet experience offered to guests at Wyndham Royal Lee Phuket”, which officially reopened last week. At the reopening ceremony, Wyndham, True and ZTE signed an MoU to “deepen collaboration with True and ZTE to further enhance the network experiences for its guests.”
