@cyberdocwi wrote:
Hello,
Performing a walkthough of an older hotel near us, we found this 1980's structure run with 4 conductor telephone lines, heavily plastered walls, no false ceilings, and no computer room. Unfortunately, no major remodels are scheduled in the near future, and this was well before the business friendly age of ethernet installation. They do have cable television. There are either 2 or 3 floors of rooms, depending on where you are.
They recently installed an overwhelming powerful WiFi system, as guests seek connectivity. The WiFi Folks ran cables for Access Points in the attic, or along ethernet cables in the hallways.
BY FAR most of the hotel guests use their cell phones, but there is the expectation of having a house phone operational in the room, perhaps for the simple reason of the desk attendant ringing the room for the pizza guy standing in the foyer.
I have a few ideas running inside my head, and seek community comment on what might make sense. We are talking about 60 telephones in total for this project, and 4 or 5 trunk lines.
1) Locate SIP VoIP Wireless phones. Not the models that have a base, and you walk around with, but a desk phone like the Sangoma 300 series that has a RF unit inside and will attach to WiFi. Again, this is not a business office with regular use, so I do not anticipate collisions of traffic, especially if the VoIP provider has hardware to perform some QoS / Management of the telephone traffic.
2) Attempt to run VoIP on telephone 4 conductor wiring. Advantage: it is a hardware solution. Disadvantage: Will 4 conductor reliably support 10 Base T traffic? I don't think I can do PoE in this arrangement, so ugly wall wart has to be plugged in somewhere. Has anyone done VoIP in this configuration that can comment?
3) Install a Cat 5 Infrastructure. Drill Holes. Run Cat 5 in conduit on the outside of the walls. Make it look like a hospital room, or a brick schoolhouse from the 70's and such. Will have the full features of the phone system on a cabled environment, but could be costly, and frankly, ugly. But it is a hotel room. Who goes to a hotel room, outside of being on a cruise, to sit in the hotel all day and be bothered by wiring?
4) Install FreePBX with some Analog Dgium cards to re-use all the old phones. NO NO NO NO NO. I think at that point, it would be better to wait for a remodel and then digitize the whole environment.
Thank you for your consideration.
Best,
Christian
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