The cheapest way to run a hotel network is to stop putting a switch cabinet on every floor. Put one OLT in the machine room, pull a single single-mode fiber to each floor, split it passively, and drop an ONU into every room. Broadband, IPTV and Wi-Fi then ride one optical plant while staying on separate VLANs.
Rayin (Shenzhen Rayin Technology) is a manufacturer of GPON OLTs and industrial Ethernet switches.
That is the whole idea, and it is why hospitality network projects keep landing on PON instead of stacking one access switch per floor. What follows is the arithmetic behind that decision: what the floor-switch design really costs, how the three guest services stay apart, and how to check the optical power budget before you order anything.
The switch approach aggregates floor by floor: a core switch in the machine room, an access switch in each floor's telecom closet, and every guest-room cable terminating on that floor. It looks obvious, and the cost hides in three places.
The closets. Every floor needs a space that can hold a cabinet, draw power and shed heat. Older buildings often have no such room, and the one they do have is not ventilated — an overheating switch that dies in summer is a routine complaint from hotel IT teams.
The cabling. Three hundred rooms at two cables each is six hundred runs, before you add the APs and the IPTV set-top boxes. In a tall building the riser trays are usually full, and pulling new cable for an expansion is not realistic.
The active node count. One switch per floor means a dozen or more powered nodes, and every one of them is a place the network can fail. Guests are unforgiving about a dead connection, and the review lands on the booking site.
PON replaces "aggregate per floor" with "connect directly, passively". A single OLT in the machine room — a 1-port or 2-port mini OLT covers most hotels, and one PON port at 1:128 splitting can serve 128 ONUs, with GPON running 2.488 Gbps downstream. From there one single-mode fiber runs to the floor's telecom shaft, where a 1:8 or 1:16 passive splitter fans it out. Each guest room gets an ONU for broadband and IPTV; corridor APs use an ONU model with an optical port, which is fiber to the AP.
The splitter is passive. It needs no power, so the shaft holds one fiber and one splitter box, and the old switch cabinet disappears from the bill of materials.
Guest broadband, IPTV and office or cashier systems are three different security levels. Separate them on the OLT by service VLAN, turn on port isolation on the ONU side so guests cannot reach each other at layer 2, and give the cashier segment its own management VLAN.
For television, the arithmetic matters. A hotel IPTV service runs on multicast: the channel stream is replicated once inside the OLT rather than pulled as a separate unicast feed by every set-top box. Two hundred rooms watching the same channel therefore consume one copy of the bandwidth, and IGMP snooping between OLT and ONU maintains the join and leave state.
| Dimension | Floor-switch design | PON design |
|---|---|---|
| Floor closet | Cabinet, power and cooling on every floor | Splitter box only, passive, no power |
| Riser cabling | One or two copper runs per room | One fiber per floor |
| Active nodes | A dozen or more switches | One OLT in the machine room |
| Room bandwidth | Shared uplink, peaks congest | 2.5 G shared, scheduled by DBA |
| IPTV delivery | Unicast copies, bandwidth multiplied by N | One multicast copy |
| Failure points | Every floor switch | Essentially the OLT and the fiber |
| Expansion | Pull new cable | Add a splitter leg |
| Per-room retrofit cost | High cable and labour | Fiber plus ONU, often through the old conduit |
Take a 10-storey, 200-room hotel. Fix the ONU count first, then check the light.
Fiber to the building (FTTB). One multi-port ONU per floor — four gigabit ports — feeding that floor's corridor APs and room switches. Ten floors plus one at the front desk plus one for CCTV is about 12 ONUs. Split 1:16 on a single PON port: insertion loss about 13.5 dB. Machine room to the furthest floor is 250 m of fiber, 250 × 0.35/1000 ≈ 0.09 dB. Six connectors at 0.5 dB each come to 3 dB, and four splices at 0.05 dB add about 0.2 dB. The total is roughly 16.8 dB. Against a 28 dB budget — a C+ module transmitting at +3 dBm into a Class B+ ONU with −27 dBm sensitivity — that leaves a margin of 11.2 dB. Generous enough that the same building could later move to fiber-to-the-room with a 1:32 split and still hold.
Fiber to the room (FTTH). One ONU per room, so 200 rooms plus corridor APs is about 230 ONUs, planned as two PON ports at 1:64, no more than 115 each. A 1:64 split costs about 21 dB of insertion loss; add 2.1 dB of connectors and 0.11 dB for 300 m of fiber and the total is about 23.2 dB. The margin is 4.8 dB: inside the ≥3 dB engineering rule, but close to the line. Every extra connector and every poor splice eats into it, so a to-the-room build demands cleaner splicing and stricter connector cleaning.
What to plan for. Retrofit projects should default to FTTB and reuse the building's existing copper, because the ONU count is low and the margin is wide. New builds can go straight to the room, but do not plan a split ratio right against the 1:128 theoretical ceiling — leave headroom for later APs and for fiber ageing.
| Service | How it is carried | Bandwidth | Isolation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guest internet | ONU in bridge mode, PPPoE or DHCP with authentication | 50–100 Mbps per room | Layer-2 isolation between rooms |
| Television | ONU port plus set-top box, multicast | 8–12 Mbps per channel | Dedicated multicast VLAN |
| Corridor Wi-Fi AP | Optical-port ONU or PoE switch | 200–500 Mbps per AP | Management VLAN |
| Front desk, cashier, door locks | Separate ONU and separate VLAN | Low | Fully isolated from guest traffic |
| CCTV cameras | Aggregated to a dedicated ONU or switch | 4 Mbps per channel | Security VLAN |
Rayin's 2-port GPON OLT is the head-end shape a hotel network like this asks for: a half-width 1U chassis with 2×GE and 1×SFP+ 10GE uplinks, and PON planning tables that work backwards from room count to PON-port count.
None of this is exotic hardware. It is a hospitality network planned as one optical plant instead of a stack of per-floor switches.
The building has no telecom closet — can the fiber still get in? Old blocks usually have spare telephone or coaxial conduit, and a single-mode drop cable is only 250 µm to 900 µm across, far thinner than a copper run, so it passes through most ducts. Where a floor really is blocked, use a pair of media converters or keep one access switch on that floor as a stopgap. PON and Ethernet can be mixed, and a staged retrofit is fine.
Guests share the PON bandwidth — will they slow down at peak? One GPON port delivers 2.488 Gbps downstream, so 64 ONUs still see close to 39 Mbps each at theoretical peak, and the OLT's DBA schedules against the committed rate. Plan hotels at 50–100 Mbps per room and keep 32–48 subscribers on a port for the steadiest experience — which is why 300 rooms get two PON ports rather than one.
The live TV source sits on the public internet — how does multicast reach the PON? Two ways. Carrier IPTV is delivered by the operator's own OLT. For a self-hosted hotel IPTV service — a local media library or a hotel-run channel — put a multicast source server in the machine room, feed it into the OLT uplink, and enable IGMP on the OLT so streams are replicated only to the ONUs that joined. Channel join and leave settle within a second, so viewers do not notice.
How do you troubleshoot an outage on this kind of network? More easily than on a switch stack. Rayin's GPON OLT reports ONU optical power and registration state centrally, so a room with abnormal loss or a dropped ONU stands out immediately. Work outwards from there: read the OLT alarms first, then measure each splitter leg. Passive parts rarely fail — dirty connectors cause most faults, and cleaning them usually restores service.
Can a hotel keep switches and PON on the same property? Yes, and most retrofits do. Run PON into the floors being refurbished, leave the floors that still work on their existing switches, and convert them as they are renovated. The two sit under one management plane, so the guest experience stays consistent while the building is being converted.
About the author: Sara — Customer Manager at Shenzhen Rayin Technology Co., Ltd., 10+ years helping ISPs and integrators build industrial networks.
About Rayin: Shenzhen Rayin Technology Co., Ltd. — Company Profile
