Individual Cables or Unified Fiber Backbone?

[Reda_ELF]

Hello everyone,


We are in the design phase of building a full network infrastructure for a hotel. The services involved include PBX (telephony), IPTV, PMS (Property Management System), surveillance cameras, Internet access, and any other services that require Ethernet connectivity (RJ45).


We are considering two possible approaches:

1. Separate cabling setup – Each service would have its own dedicated Ethernet cabling (e.g., one for phones, another for cameras, another for IPTV, etc.).
2. Converged fiber backbone setup – All services would connect to a customized central switch, and this switch would have a single fiber optic uplink that carries all the services combined. This fiber would then be distributed to other switches or endpoints.

We’d really appreciate your advice on which architecture is more reliable and scalable for a hotel environment. Are there any risks, trade-offs, or best practices we should be aware of with either approach?


Thanks in advance for your insights!

 

[Dev_Mgr]

How many rooms will need to be connected? There's a big difference between a <50 room hotel's cabling needs versus a 200+ room hotel.

Your "two possible approaches" seem to discuss completely different parts of the network. The first looks to talk about cabling from the rooms to the network closet, and the second looks to be for the connectivity from the network closet to "upstream".

If properly secured you can usually combine things into 1 network (switch count and cable type would depend on room count and distances), but personally I'd consider putting "customer traffic (wifi for guests and maybe ethernet ports in the rooms if you plan to offer this)" on a separate physical network, to help keeping that isolated from your security (cameras) and other internal (e.g. reservation management, financial, etc) traffic.