[VoiceOps] Hotel Phone Requirements

[Paul Timmins]



Yep, that's pretty much every hotel I've ever seen, fancy or not. In the fancier ones your adtran will go on a nice backboard in a closet mostly dedicated to the mitel and the gigantic video distribution system that will slowly bake your gear with time. In the seedier ones, you're mounting it over a mop sink and your adtran will end up supporting a broom leaned against it.

Everything is poorly labeled, original construction cable, painted over a dozen times, and fixed by whoever had reasonably compatible parts and was closest at the time, if not the lowest bidder, or both.

If you get everything punched down clean and mounted without breaking something else in the room that's brittle, unmaintained, or already broken and nobody knows what it is to remove it, and the service works without followup calls? You win.

Good luck, because if the TVs stop working next week, it's probably your fault and they'll demand your team dispatch to look at it. You can bill them for the dispatch, they won't pay it anyway, half of them hit toll restrict before they pay their bill every month anyway.

It's not my favorite business segment. But the internet can be lucrative if they didn't half ass the wifi and router/captive portal setup. If they're serviced by encore, their techs can be really demanding with IP space and weirdly insistent about things, but they're honestly decent to work with most of the time and they keep calls down to you. If they're serviced by the owner's grandson, then you can bet you'll get calls from exasperated front desk staff when someone sneezes wrong on the unifi controller they're running off a cloud key they bought off eBay and plugged into a switched outlet in the broom closet. lol.

-Paul

(my employer likes me to point out that this in no way reflects their opinions or mine in my official capacity, and these are strictly my personal opinions only)

> On Feb 2, 2024, at 14:49, Carlos Alvarez via VoiceOps <voiceops at voiceops.org> wrote:
> 
> I’ve looked into this for two mid size hotels.  I decided that we were not qualified, and also had no idea how to price it and be fair but profitable.  Here’s a bullet list of concerns which I think are unique to the industry:
> 
> 911 requirements are stringent and detailed.
> Wiring was ancient in both properties, not ready for ethernet.  This seemed “normal” in the industry according to them.
> Even for analog, some wiring was sketchy and we were unsure about being able to re punch down corroded wires.
> Neither had any fixed IT support contracts and suggested that was normal in the industry.
> They about coughed up their skulls at an estimate of running fiber backbones for reliability, because the copper was ancient.
> They mostly require 24/7 support.
> 
> 
> Enjoy this photo of one of the IDFs.  Which they didn’t want to pay to rebuild, and indeed, nobody knows how far back that cable is damaged.
> 
> <843286D3-19D4-41CA-9827-98AD773C6F1B_1_105_c.jpeg>
> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 2, 2024 at 12:40:33 PM, Nate Burke via VoiceOps <voiceops at voiceops.org <mailto:voiceops at voiceops.org>> wrote:
>> We run a WISP, and have been doing business phone systems for a long 
>> time.  We provide Internet connections and Voice Trunk services to 
>> hotels today, but a few are asking us to quote taking over their 
>> internal phone networks (Usually from Mitel systems).
>> 
>> Just curious what caveats others have run into specifically with 
>> Hotels.  Seems different than a typical office setup.  Thinking about 
>> the need to re-bill usage on a daily basis, per room 911 concerns, Daily 
>> Voicemail setup/cleans.  What else would make a setup like this special?
>> 
>> Nate Burke
>> 
>> Blast Communications
>> 
>> 
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