Fiber to desktop helps Hilton Hawaiian Village provide aloha guest experience

Deploying optical fiber cables to users` desktops throughout the 22-acre Hilton Hawaiian Village complex provides hotel employees with the response time needed to give guests an "aloha experience", according to Patrick McHugh, Management Information Systems Director. With 1800 employees and 2542 rooms spread over 24 acres in Waikiki, communications between the front office, housekeeping, maintenance, catering, accounting, and other departments is a real challenge. By installing fiber optic cable running 100 Mb per second switched Ethernet, the hotel dramatically increased networking performance compared to the previous token ring network.

Surprisingly, the installed cost of fiber actually came in below conventional Category 5 enhanced cabling primarily because its greater link length made it possible to cover the entire complex with only two active network closets. In addition the gigabit per second capacity of fiber is expected to provide a 20-year life compared to only 4 years for Category 5E cabling.

The Hilton Hawaiian Village offers lush tropical gardens, waterfalls of exotic wildlife, award-winning restaurants, great entertainment, 100 shops, boutiques and restaurants, a year-round children`s program, Atlantis submarine rides, Hawaiian cultural activities, a 10,000 square foot super pool and Waikiki`s best beach to sun and surf. Both federal and state wildlife agencies have praised the hotel and its staff for allowing it to become a haven for injured endemic and endangered Hawaiian birds. The hotel offers over 150,000 square feet of meeting, convention and outdoor function space. With more than 20,000 square feet, the Coral Ballroom in the Mid-Pacific Conference Center can accommodate receptions of up to 2,400 people. The hotel recently broke ground on a new 24-story guestroom tower that will feature 453 guestrooms and suites, a three-level health and wellness spa and a Hawaiian interactive cultural center.

With up to 10,000 guests and employees on the premises when the hotel is fully booked, the Hilton Hawaiian Village is as populated as a small city and depends upon very sophisticated management information and communications systems. Each of the different functions within the hotel has computer applications to check guests in and out, manage housekeeping assignments, track guest preferences and requests, manage employee workload, perform cost accounting, handle sales and catering functions, oversee construction projects as well as many other functions required to operate a hotel of this size. The fact that the hotel is a resort means that management is determined to provide far better than usual service and responsiveness to guest needs. Being located in Hawaii, management insists on going a step further by providing an "aloha experience", which means eliminating the delays and aggravations that might be expected in an ordinary hotel.

Providing this level of service over the range of distances found at the Hilton Hawaiian Village puts a premium on networking performance. In the past, the hotel operated midrange systems over a token ring network. As the applications grew in complexity and the hotel expanded its operations, performance became a problem. On a typical day, the hotel has 1400 guests checking in and out. The Hilton is committed to making no guest wait more than one minute to perform either of these activities. The hotel also prides itself on providing an immediate response when a customer calls on the special line used to accept service requests. Over time, the response time of the previous system became a limiting factor in providing a high level of service.

"We made incremental improvements in the token ring network by using switching technology but soon it became apparent that we needed to move to Ethernet," McHugh said. About the same time, the decision was made to move applications to a client/server environment.

"Clearly we had our work cut out for us," McHugh said. "We basically had to reinvent our architecture from scratch without interrupting service to the 400-plus PCs and printers on our network. Almost from the very beginning we ran into cabling issues. We originally planned to install Cat 5 cabling but experienced roadblocks in the planning stage. The hotel was constructed without any networking infrastructure so hardware was located in rooms that were also used for electrical and mechanical systems. We were warned that the electrical equipment would interfere with copper cabling. We were told that we could overcome this problem by using shielded cabling but that would substantially raise both the equipment and installation cost. Many of these rooms also contain transformers and other equipment that make them very hot. We would have had to install air conditioning in many of them to enable our networking equipment to survive."

In the back of his mind, McHugh recognized that use of optical fiber cable could eliminate many of these problems. Optical signals are, of course, immune to electrical interference. Optical fiber cable also had the potential to eliminate these problems. Because it can handle much longer runs than copper, which is limited to 100 meters, fiber cable would have required far fewer cabinets. There was at least one cabinet in each of the hotel`s six buildings without a heat problem, and that is all that would have been required in a fiber installation.

Unfortunately, when McHugh began preparing specifications for the installation, traditional fiber solutions would have cost approximately five times as much as a copper installation, due to both higher component costs and the difficulty of installing conventional ferruled optical fiber connectors and networking equipment.

"Just about the time that I was going to finalize my plans with a copper cable design," McHugh said, "3M introduced their Volition optical fiber line. Volition represents a major departure from traditional fiber, first of all because component costs are so much lower. At the time it was introduced, it cost about 50% more than copper while today the price difference has narrowed to about 20%. Just as important, this new design is far less expensive from an installation standpoint than traditional optical fiber. It uses a unique connector with the same look and feel as a traditional RJ-45 modular jack. The result is that Volition can be installed in about the same time as copper cabling."

The V-groove technology used in the VF-45 connector replaces the costly ferrules used in traditional SC fiber optic connectors. The simple mechanical connection formed with the V-grooves requires only two minutes instead of 10 to 15 minutes for a duplex connection, and the components are approximately one-seventh the cost.

"Once I figured everything out on paper, it became clear that on an installed basis, it was actually going to be considerably less expensive to use fiber than copper," McHugh said. "First of all, fiber handles much greater transmission distances. The 62.5-micron cable that we used in the first phase can handle runs of 300 meters. Since then, we have adopted 50-micron fiber as our standard because it goes 500 meters. This meant we needed just one cabinet in each building and eliminated the need for installing air conditioning. Centralizing our networking hardware in a single closet also reduced equipment cost. One reason is that having to use three or four cabinets in a single building would have left us with many empty ports on many of our switches. Fiber eliminated the need for repeaters. It also cost less than copper to install because many of our offices are in old hotel rooms with full ceilings. The actual pulling strength of fiber is 100 pounds, considerably more than copper, which makes it much easier to overcome these types of problems."

"Of course, the biggest advantage of fiber is not the relatively small amount of money it saved us in the initial installation but rather the huge amount of money that it will save over the next 20 years," McHugh said. "If we had installed cat 5 enhanced cabling, my expectation is that we would have had to take it all out and put in cat 6 in three or four years in order to handle Gigabit Ethernet. Optical fiber cable, on the other hand, is rated to 9 gigabits so it will take us through the next two generations, probably 15 to 20 years. From what we had seen, the reliability of fiber is also substantially higher. We have had many copper failures in addition to problems with kinks and bends in wire that prevented us from going from 10 to 100 megabits. But we have never experienced a single connector failure and the reports I have seen show a failure rating for fiber of only one in 12,000 connectors."

"Installing optical fiber cable has played a major role in allowing us to continue to improve our service levels," McHugh concluded. "It provides us with considerably higher levels of performance and reliability than our previous copper cabling. This makes it possible to provide an immediate response to the needs of our guests. Just as important, fiber provides us with an infrastructure that will allow us to continually improve levels of service without having to undergo the cost and disruption of recabling for at least the next 15 years. For example, it will make it possible to provide high speed Internet access in our new tower with very little additional equipment."

For more information contact 3M Communication Markets Division, 3M Austin Center, Building A130-2N-01, 6801 River Place Blvd, Austin, TX 78726-9000 Phone: 800 695 0447 Fax: 512 984 5811Internet: www.3m.com/volition.