Meru Networks Provides Wireless Network At Five Star Hôtel Du Cap-Eden-Roc On French Riviera

A scalable, powerful and secure platform ensures seamless roaming and high quality of service at French Riviera haven

Paris, April 7th, 2009 – The legendary Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera, recognized as one of the world’s most beautiful hotels, is using high speed wireless networking technology from Meru Networks to add a new dimension to the high quality service it offers its guests.

The hotel, situated in a scenic park environment overlooking the Mediterranean between Nice and Cannes, sought a wireless network to provide a seamless, high speed multi media network that would permit it to extend its legendary level of service to the communications and internet access it provides its guests. 

The wireless network had to act as reliably as an online concierge to the hotel’s prestigious clientele, which includes executives and artists attending the Cannes film and TV festivals. Meru was the only vendor that could assure the service that Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc required.

“This project presented a double challenge,” said Philippe Perd, Director of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, “ensuring the peace and wellbeing of our customer during installations, while offering them easy, reliable, and secure Internet access.”

“Our customers expect the very highest standards of service at all levels and choose our hotel because they know that we can guarantee their peace and quiet. That said, they also need to be able to work, and therefore to reach the Internet, easily and securely, no matter what device they are using,” Philippe Perd said.

“We wanted a durable Five Star answer to this wireless challenge. We studied several offers and Meru Networks proposed the best in terms of performance, scalability, security and price. We were also attracted by the ease of installation and implementation offered by Meru Networks’ unique wireless LAN technology.”

The new wireless infrastructure from Meru Networks was designed and deployed last year by Meru partner I2S. The ease with which a Meru WLAN can be deployed – needing fewer APs and no site surveys as required by other suppliers, allowed the deployment to be invisible to guests.

The new network ensures that the hotel’s guests can access the Internet easily and safely wherever they are on the eight hectare (17,000 square meters) property with the assurance that they don’t drop off the network as they roam.   

In addition, hotel staff needing mobile access can connect to the network anywhere from the buildings or grounds, further ensuring the “always on” service the hotel seeks to provide.

“The solution we implemented has already proved its efficiency. We plan to rapidly enhance and expand our network to provide our customers with VoIP and HDTV, and eventually switch to a wireless telephone network,” said Philippe PERD of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

The network is configured to support future delivery of voice over IP (VoIP) and HDTV.  The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc plans to eventually move its entire telephone network to a wireless solution, by connecting to the Meru Networks’ architecture with the existing software only updated access points.

“Meru Networks’ Technology was the only technology on the market able to rise to this challenge,” said Stephan De Santis, Project Director at System Integrator I2S.   “As well as its high performance, the infrastructure also supports all the devices required by the hotel, and the highly evolutionary nature of this solution made it possible to plan for VOIP, HDTV, and a wireless telephony system, without having to modify the solution’s infrastructure”.

The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc wireless deployment uses Meru AP200 802.11 a/b/g access points, and an MC3000 series controller, which provides centralized intelligence to easily deploy and manage large-scale wireless LANs.  Meru access points deliver unsurpassed Wi-Fi performance and the very highest levels of security, and can support up to 128 users.

The controller will be able to manage additional access points when they are added to expand the hotel’s wireless service to include voice over wireless IP and HDTV over wireless.

In Meru's virtualized WLAN architecture, a single channel is selected for use by all access points enterprise-wide, and a dedicated "virtual port" is assigned to each client device to maximize performance, reliability, and enterprise control over wireless resources.  Additional channels can be layered as more capacity is required.  In contrast, legacy WLAN systems from other vendors use a "micro cell" approach, which assigns different radio channels to many small adjacent AP cells to ensure that no two APs use the same channel in the same place.  This requires precise and time-consuming channel planning and AP power adjustments to work well, making it difficult to load-balance in dense environments, and limiting future network expansion.