Marriott exec shares converged network "horror story"

Neil Schubert is only partly kidding when he calls Marriott International’s move toward a converged network a “horror story.”

“I’m here to tell you a terrifying tale of network design, support and administration,” he said to an audience Thursday at the IDC IT Forum & Expo in Boston. Marriott International runs a variety of hotel chains from Renaissance Hotels to the Ritz-Carlton, supporting more than 3,200 properties, 580,000 rooms and 2 million nodes. The so-called horror story began about 10 years ago when the organization began offering broadband access to guests, Schubert said. Things really got bad during an 18-month period in 2005 and 2006 after a TV commercial showed a guest of Marriott’s Courtyard hotels using free high-speed Internet access and video telephone technology.

Customer connections and bandwidth consumption increased fourfold, according to Schubert, the vice president of IT strategy.

“This ad came out before we knew about it,” Schubert said. “This brand typically had one DSL circuit into every hotel for 160 customers. It didn’t work real well at first.”

The problem was exacerbated by guests using Slingbox, a device allowing cable customers to view television on their laptops live over the Internet. “It’s a great product as a consumer but terrifying as a network administrator,” Schubert said. “The good news is bandwidth will never be more expensive and it will never be slower than it is today.”

Marriott International recently decided to install guest room connectivity panels that support PC audio and video, MP3 players, camcorders, DVD players, digital cameras and gaming systems. By the end of this year, 100,000 will be deployed, according to Schubert.

The experience of accommodating consumers’ increasing needs for bandwidth has convinced Marriott to develop a converged network serving both guests and staff.

“One of the things we’ve learned about our guest networks is we have one of the most foreign, hostile environments known to man in the network administration world,” Schubert said. “I can take 100,000 customers a night on that infrastructure and we actually have less incidents of harm than we do on our corporate back-office infrastructure.”

Schubert describes Marriott’s current setup as a “cloudy sky” of networks supporting individual functions like Internet access, a VPN, telephone systems, back-office wireless connections, guest wireless, television and security.

By the end of 2007, Schubert says Marriott will have implemented what he calls a LAN service provider model in which everything is covered by a telephone system, an IP property network and security. The long-term goal is to have everything under one IP-based property network.

Plans for hotels include a distributed antenna system with a converged voice and data network, having all access points located in the telecom closet, up to four antennas used for coverage, and up to four access points used for bandwidth.

In the long term, Marriott officials want a common network architecture for every location.