A 2016 American Hotel & Lodging Association survey found that high-speed Internet with wireless access is now considered an industry norm at 98 percent of surveyed hotels. Seventy-six percent of travelers are willing to spend more on a hotel with high ratings, according to Alex Tan, Vice President of Asia-Pacific sales at TrustYou. People now expect a strong Wi-Fi connection when they stay at a hotel, and they’re quick to complain about hotel review sites if they don’t get it.
Providing consistent high-speed Wi-Fi can be a challenge for hotels and multiple dwelling units (MDUs), including apartment buildings and college dormitories. Users now expect to wirelessly connect multiple devices — laptops, tablets and smartphones — from one room, placing heavy demands on the local network and internet connection. Communications solutions provider CCI Systems recognized this challenge and developed an innovative solution.
CCI Systems offers cloud-based solution to hotel managers and cable companies
Michigan-based CCI Systems delivers across-the-network solutions for communication networks, offering consulting, engineering, construction, deployment, maintenance and support. For more than 60 years, the company has been helping customers with a special focus on service providers. CCI Systems developed the Network Engineering Assessment Tool (NEAT) dashboard to give service providers and property owners real-time insight into the performance of their Internet networks. NEAT works via an online monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) application developed by LogicMonitor.
With NEAT, hotel managers and other users can track network Wi-Fi performance and identify any issues that need to be addressed. And they can do it before those issues have exploded into full-blown problems that impact hotel guests and potentially lead to negative online reviews or stories of a bad experience shared with friends and family.
“People increasingly look for reviews of the Wi-Fi before choosing a hotel,” said Sparky Farwell, CCI Systems’ Director. “Hotel guests want a smooth connection to check in with their dog sitter, catch up on work emails, buy show tickets, post travel photos to social media and generally keep in touch with friends and family at home. With our NEAT dashboard, hotels can satisfy their guests’ expectations to easily and quickly connect to the Internet.”
LogicMonitor’s monitoring platform is the “foundation of our offering”
To deliver innovative solutions to customers, CCI Systems partners with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers that provide robust, automated cloud-based solutions. SaaS solutions save time and money; no major capital investment is required up front, and there is less burden to maintain hardware and software for on-prem. LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based, hybrid infrastructure performance monitoring platform is at the heart of CCI’s NEAT solution.
Relationship with LogicMonitor is transformative, not transactional
“We leverage LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based performance monitoring platform as the foundation of our monitoring-as-a-service offering,” Sparky said. “We appreciate the performance visibility we gain from a single pane of glass view. We’ve taken the LogicMonitor platform and put it in some niche areas that allow us to deliver exceptional customer support.”
Some customers don’t want to monitor Internet service directly, so they hire CCI Systems to keep an eye on network performance and to handle customer support calls and inquiries. As a result, CCI can add incremental revenue without having to make additional investments in people, power or new IT systems, he added.
We appreciate the performance visibility we gain from a single pane of glass view. We’ve taken the LogicMonitor platform and put it in some niche areas that allow us to deliver exceptional customer support.
Sparky Farwell Director, CCI Systems