Antigua Village Resort (AVR) is a condominium beach resort located on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. This resort is located on Dickenson Bay which is one of Antigua’s most breathtaking beaches and offers a unique combination of
tranquility, character, and local culture that encapsulates the spirit of the Caribbean. The resort has approximately 100 guest rooms and plays a pivotal role in contributing to the island’s tourism sector. All the rooms in the resort overlook the azure waters of the Caribbean Sea and are surrounded by lush tropical gardens.
For many years prior to the installation of Grandstream’s solutions, Antigua Village Resort was dependent on an outdated Analog Telephone Network to provide the infrastructure for ADSL internet service and voice services inside the resort’s 100 guest rooms and admin offices. Out-of-date ADSL routers and DSLAM equipment from Calix Technologies were used to provide internet and voice services, which resulted in the entire resort being plagued with very poor internet and voice services inside the guest rooms.
The administrative staff of the resort constantly received complaints from the hotel guests about slow to almost non-existent internet service. This resulted in guests regularly leaving damaging reviews about the poor communications services available on well-known hospitality sites like Trip Advisor. In the competitive industry of hospitality and tourism, bad reviews can seriously damage the reputation of a resort, particularly in a place like Antigua where hospitality is very competitive.
Due to the outdated infrastructure of ADSL internet service and voice services, there was a major need to revamp the resort’s property-wide network infrastructure to provide reliable data and voice services for guest rooms and admin offices. This is a necessity to compete in the ever-growing hospitality industry where having a reliable internet connection is vital to ensure all the operations in the resort run smoothly and guests can connect to the internet anywhere on the property.
Antigua Village Resort’s dire requirement for secure, reliable, and much faster internet speed throughout the property, coupled with its aging analog telephone network led them to contact ICT Consultants Lumac Tech Ltd., to assist their situation and provide a future full-proof solution to revamp the communications services within the resort. The installer, Lumac Tech Ltd considered Ubiquiti Unifi Solutions along with Grandstream’s Solutions, however, decided to go ahead with Grandstream’s solutions as they could provide the complete communications package that the resort was looking for and included both Wi-Fi and voice solutions. Additionally, Grandstream’s Access Points portfolio offered better prices and performance compared to the Ubiquiti Access Points.
After a lot of due diligence and careful consideration between different brands, Lumac Tech Ltd. decided to move forward with Grandstream’s solutions as they could provide the complete communications package that Antigua Village Resort was after to solve their current requirements. Lumac Tech. deployed both networking and IP telephony solutions from Grandstream to resolve the resort’s needs.
GWN7602: Lumac Tech installed Grandstream’s GWN7602, a compact indoor Wi-Fi Access Point ideal for hotels and similar deployments. The GWN7602 was installed in all the rooms within the Antigua Village Resort to provide next-generation high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity to all the guests within the rooms.
GWN Cloud: GWN.Cloud is Grandstream’s free-of-cost Wi-Fi management platform which is a centralized cloud-based software that allows installers to easily manage all Wi-Fi Access Points deployed with ease and from any remote location. This allowed the Lumac Tech team to easily set up several Wi-Fi SSIDs and provided the ability to choose which SSIDs to assign to specific GWN Access Points. By being able to do this, the installers were able to establish specific SSIDs for guest traffic and a hidden SSID for admin traffic so admin staff could easily move around the Antigua Village Resort without losing any connectivity as they performed their day-to-day operations.
In addition to solving the resort’s networking issue, the resort’s voice services also needed to be revamped which is why the installer decided to put into service a comprehensive Grandstream IP Telephony System solution at the Antigua Village Resort to replace their dated analog PBX system which was causing issues. Phone services inside the guest rooms were very poor due to their obsolete analog telephone network.
The telephony solution included UCM6308 IPPBX and GRP2601P IP Phones in all the guest rooms across the resort. These phones were powered by one of the two PoE/PoE+ on the GWN7602 Access Point in each room. Inside the administrative offices of the resort, GRP2604 IP Phones were implemented with one GRP2615 IP Phone which was used at the main reception desk at the resort.
Antigua Village Resort’s management personnel and staff were very impressed with the voice quality of Grandstream telephones and utilized a plethora of features that the PBX offers such as call conferencing, call forwarding, voicemail, call park, etc. The resort management also utilizes the IP PBX’s IVR system, automatic call forwarding, and out-of-office messaging based on configured office hours.
After the project of deploying Grandstream’s solutions all over the resort was complete, Antigua Village Resort’s key stakeholders were and still are extremely pleased with the Grandstream solutions provided by the service provider, Lumac Tech. After the deployment of Grandstream’s Solutions, there have been no guest complaints about the internet or voice services deployed in the guest rooms.
There are plans in place for Lumac Tech to work with the Antigua Village Resort officials to implement the integration of their Grandstream IP PBX System with their Property Management System and to implement Grandstream’s UCM RemoteConnect service with Mobile Wave Applications for increased mobile capability.