Yotel, the hotel chain founded by entrepreneur Simon Woodroffe, aims to make a virtue of its blend of the dinky and the luxurious. Offering a cost-conscious high-class service is hard coded into its corporate DNA – making a converged network
infrastructure an obvious choice.

At its new airside hotel at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, Yotel has introduced a new network, incorporating voice, video and data-based business applications all managed from its UK base.
The network architecture, designed and implemented by virtual network operator TFM Networks, underpins Yotel’s expansion plans, as the Amsterdam site follows deployment of the network at Yotel’s London headquarters and its Heathrow and Gatwick airport hotels.

“Keeping infrastructure costs down is key,” says Nigel Buchanan, operations director at Yotel. Nevertheless, it still needed a network that could cope with demand.
“Being able to scale up is crucial if you find a location that has a heavy bandwidth requirement. For example, Schiphol has double the size requirement of Heathrow,” he says.

The Yotel is located inside Schiphol’s terminal and houses 57 Japanese-style cabins, all equipped with free Wi-Fi and wired internet access and flat-screen TVs with all applications running over the network infrastructure.
“We give customers an element of luxury and innovative design and part of this includes good internet access. The network allows us to automate parts of the customer experience which reduces overheads in terms of administration. Customers can book online and enter their booking reference into a touch-screen kiosk when they arrive at the hotel to get their key card.

Their booking reference code is the same for Wi-Fi use and there is excellent connectivity everywhere,” says Buchanan.
The network has been designed to handle all of the company's business requirements, from the streaming of IP-based CCTV to time-critical, secure operations such as credit card checks and the handling of customer details.

“Having a network for Yotel customers and the administrative office in central London allows us
to run a series of IP products and services across the network. We pay for our broadband and internet pipe but do not have to pay for expensive telephone calls,” says Buchanan.