How a hotel WiFi network is laid out, from the internet line to the access point outside room 312 - the topology, where access points go, how the networks are separated and what to check before anyone pulls a cable.
Read it as a diagram from the street to the guest's phone.
Two lines from two different providers where possible - a main fibre line and a backup - so a cut cable does not take the hotel offline.
One router at the core runs the guest hotspot, the firewall, failover between the lines and the encrypted tunnel to the management cloud. On iberry sites this is MikroTik RouterOS.
Sits next to the gateway in the server room or rack, and feeds a switch on each floor or block. PoE means the same cable powers the access point.
One per floor or wing, each connected back to the core. Keep every cable run under 100 metres; beyond that, add a switch or use fibre between buildings.
Ceiling or wall units in corridors, rooms and public areas, outdoor units for lawns and pools - MikroTik, TP-Link Omada or Ubiquiti UniFi.
Every phone and laptop gets an address from the gateway, sees the login page, and is then held to its own speed and data limits.
A hotel network carries very different traffic, and it must not all be on one network. VLANs keep each kind apart on the same switches and cables, with firewall rules between them at the gateway.
Captive portal, per-guest limits, devices isolated from each other.
Front office, back office and managers, with access to the PMS and printers.
Cameras and the recorder, with no route to or from the guest network.
Kept apart from everything else, reachable only by the staff who need it.
The switches and access points themselves, reachable only by the people who run them.
Coverage is decided by walls, not by floor area. Brick, concrete and stone absorb WiFi; a corridor access point that looks fine on a plan may barely reach the bathroom end of a room. For concrete buildings, access points in the rooms - or one between every two rooms - give a far better result than a row of corridor units turned up to full power.
Design for capacity as well as coverage. Plan for two or three devices per guest, plus conference rooms and the restaurant at their busiest. Prefer 5 GHz for guests, use narrow channel widths in dense areas, keep transmit power moderate so neighbouring access points do not shout over each other, and plan channels so adjacent units differ. A guest walking from the lobby to their room should roam between access points without a fresh login.
One internet line plus a backup, one gateway router, one PoE switch per floor or a single switch for a small building, one access point per two rooms (or one per room in thick-walled buildings), and one or two for reception and the restaurant.
A core switch with fibre to each block, separate switches per floor, in-room or between-room access points, outdoor units for grounds and pools, dedicated coverage for banquet halls sized to the event, and two internet lines with load sharing.
In both cases the guest side is run the same way: one login per guest - by PMS room and surname, voucher or SMS OTP - with limits and a session record. See captive portal software.
Every floor, with wall materials marked, and the outdoor areas.
Somewhere cool, ventilated and lockable for the gateway and core switch, with a UPS.
How cables will reach each floor and room in a finished building.
UPS for the gateway and switches - the access points draw power through them.
Which property management system you run, if guests will log in by room number.
A network that nobody watches degrades within months. Decide who will.
As a starting point, one per two rooms in a typical building and one per room where walls are thick concrete or stone, plus units for the lobby, restaurant, conference rooms and outdoor areas. A survey of the actual building sets the final number.
In concrete buildings, in or between the rooms. Corridor access points have to push signal through the room door and wall to reach the bed and bathroom, which often fails. In light partition buildings, corridor units can work.
One that is designed for the building, gives each guest their own login and limits, keeps guests, staff and cameras on separate networks, and is actively managed. The hardware brand matters less than that; iberry works with MikroTik, TP-Link Omada and Ubiquiti UniFi.
Access points need to be configured and monitored together, whether by a hardware controller, a cloud controller or the router. The guest login, limits and records are a separate layer, which iberry runs from the cloud.
Yes. We design from your floor plans, a local installer fits the cabling and hardware to our plan, and we configure and manage the network remotely.
Send them with the room count and the internet line you have, and we will come back with a design. See also how much hotel WiFi costs. Published plans in India: ₹30,000 one-time for 30-40 rooms, ₹50,000 for 40-60 rooms and ₹99,000 for large and five-star hotels, each with ₹15,000 yearly maintenance. Outside India every project is quoted on its own, because the hardware is usually bought locally.
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