How Samsung Webinar Touches on the Future of Hospitality

Whether it be for business or leisure, hotel guests are expecting more than conference room wifi and pressed sheets to win them over. One of the biggest problems many hotels face is the lack of accessible, mobile, easy to configure Wi-Fi for guests whose whole experience may be reliant on. Samsung hosted a webinar on Thursday, June 6 highlighting its cloud-based solutions to help combat disruptors to connectivity in the hospitality industry and beyond.

Simon Lok, CTO of RG Net, helped simplify Samsung’s plan for delivering true mobile and secure connectivity for the hospitality industry to those in attendance. One of the fundamental tools behind Samsung’s solution is the deployment of VLANs (Virtual Local Access Network). Although not a new concept in the world of IT, Simon Lok and Samsung took a different approach using them.

“The way that VLAN deployment is done today is largely a manifestation of an idea that doesn’t make sense knowing what we do now.” Lok Said.

What Samsung is looking for is connectivity beyond the hotel room without sacrificing security in a system of dozens of connections.

“The idea is to build one single unified access structure… and you’re going to deploy VLANs dynamically to that,” Lok stated.

Their system automatically deals with MAC address management compared to manual programming and allows people to connect their own devices into their own networks, individualizing and privatizing server and internet using VLAN.

This results in a personalized virtual router for a guest– enabling real-time connectivity personalization for different guest needs as well as reduced overhead and manual labor to update the programming as necessary.

“You’re getting a more mobile-like infrastructure but you’re getting it over a 5 ghz network. In essence, if you combine those two things you orchestrate a simple but private deployment model with full mobility—far superior to any traditional method.” Lok said.

Samsung’s expectation is to enable hotel and other high-occupancy guests to be fully mobile in a technological world where staying connected indoors continues to be difficult for many. Having an unlicensed Wi-Fi system with a more mobile feel to it to handle a high volume of devices and onboarding from different locations within a hotel is the ultimate goal, and many have already begun the transition.