Today the digital IHTF 2021 starts and we are very happy to be part of it as an exhibitor. At 1:35 pm (12:35 pm GMT+1), our CEO Emilio Dragas will hold a 30-minute session including a panel discussion on “Future Network” together with Niklas Unger, Director of IT & Digital Business at B&B Hotels. To participate, you can register for free here. Also feel free to stop by our digital booth. Our experts will be there to answer your questions at any time during the next 2 days. We look forward to seeing you there!
m3connect donates 500€ to the Blindenwerkstätte Dorsten GmbH. They belong to the companies that are not having an easy time at the moment. In order for them to be able to continue the wonderful work they do for a long time, they are dependent on orders and donations. The Blindenwerkstätte Dorsten employs people who repeatedly encounter limitations in life due to their disability. Together they make household and textile goods and finish advertising materials with the company logo. They will now use the donated money to make socks, which in turn will be given as a donation to the children’s village “Die gute Hand” in Kürten-Diesfeld. We are very pleased to have been able to support this special company with our orders and donations since many years.
On April 27 and 28, the International Hotel Technology Forum will take place virtually for the first time and we are happy to be part of it again in 2021. The IHTF brings hoteliers and suppliers together to take a look at the technical and digital future of hospitality.
On the 27th of April at 13:35 (12:35 pm GMT+1), our CEO Emilio Dragas will join Niklas Unger, Director of IT & Digital Business at B&B Hotels, for a 30-minute session followed by a panel discussion. Under the motto “Future Network”, they will present our best practices at B&B Hotels. Please feel free to visit us at our virtual booth. Our hospitality experts will be on hand during the two days of the event to offer advice and answer questions via live chat. To participate, simply register here free of charge. We look forward to meeting you online!
Hotel Indigo Dubai Downtown, which opened in September 2020, offers both guests and staff a secure and reliable network at all times. m3connect connected the new IHG® Hotels and Resorts property to the guest WLAN “IHG® Connect” and other property systems.
Furthermore, IP telephony, IPTV, access control, room and energy management systems, digital signage and more were successfully implemented and configured on the basis of Cisco Meraki hardware. Centrally managed via the cloud, the network technology ensures highly stable and reliable connections and enhances the guests’ online experience as well as the productivity of the hotel management team.
One of the main challenges was ensuring the seamless network integration of over 15 different guest facing services in addition to IHG® Connect, whilst segregating and securing access to each individual application. m3connect was able to coordinate the multiple system integrators and execute this task successfully.
“m3connect has successfully provided a network solution that enables an optimal guest experience,” sums up Amila Udana, the Technology Manager at Hotel Indigo Dubai Downtown. “m3connect particularly excelled at coordinating the many service providers and ensuring a smooth and trouble-free system roll-out.”
© Hotel Indigo Dubai Downtown
For KORIAN Deutschland AG, m3connect paves the way for the digitalization of healthcare. 100 KORIAN nursing homes in Germany are to be equipped with a wireless local area network and a wired network across the board by June 2021.
As a pilot project, a wireless local area network with a powerful internet connection was set up at the Betreuungszentrum Seidenhof Nettetal in less than a week. The Betreuungszentrum Seidenhof Nettetal in North Rhine-Westphalia has been converted into a quarantine centre for Covid-19 patients at the suggestion of the Viersen district even before it opened. In addition to internet access for residents, the network can also be used for the digitalization of healthcare processes to relieve nursing staff and for the use of telemedicine. Another pilot project was started at Haus Lindental in Krefeld. Here, the network was optimized so that it can also be used for future IoT technologies.
When connecting the houses, m3connect minimizes the effort through intelligent use of the existing infrastructure. LAN, coaxial and two-wire cabling are optimally used, partly also in hybrid solutions.
In addition to setting up the infrastructure in the individual houses, the houses can also be networked with each other in order to consolidate lines and save costs.
Data security is guaranteed in the shared network by a virtual separation of the user groups. Guests, residents, staff and administration communicate in separate areas for which different access paths and tariffs can be set up.
With a comprehensive rollout service and minimum effort for KORIAN, m3connect modernizes one location after the other. As soon as the head office gives the start signal, m3connect plans and implements the expansion together with the nursing home concerned and takes over the operation and monitoring of the infrastructure. In the future, KORIAN will be able to obtain information about the utilization of the sites and the response times in the event of faults at any time via the m3connect dashboard.
KORIAN is the largest care provider in Europe. In the meantime, m3connect has equipped several KORIAN Deutschland AG homes with a future-proof infrastructure network. According to the Nursing Staff Strengthening Act, digital measures to relieve the burden on nursing staff will be subsidized by up to 40% of the total expenditure until the end of 2021.
Holiday Inn Lusaka has recently been renovated to reflect a best in class Holiday Inn product. m3connect was selected to provide and install the latest network technology at the hotel .
In the guest WLAN “IHG® Connect”, guests’ devices automatically connect to the hotel network after a one-time registration as soon as they are within range. Additionally, wired Internet, VoIP, IPTV, access control, room and energy management, digital signage and the video surveillance system are now integrated into the network prepared and set up by m3connect within the hotel operations. m3connect has also planned and prepared the subsequent connection.
“It was a pleasure to work with the m3connect team,“ emphasises Mark Ross, the hotel manager at the Holiday Inn Lusaka. “With their assistance, guidance and support we were able to roll out the IHG® Connect system as per timeline. I would recommend m3connect for future projects as well.“
© Holiday Inn Lusaka
Since January 2021, we have been able to count many new faces among our team and are very pleased to be able to strengthen our departments despite the currently difficult situation. We welcomed 17 new colleagues to our Aachen location on their first day of work and provided them with a detailed and relaxed office tour in a small group and a personal exchange with their superiors. Now we will get to know each other better through digital meetings, get-to-know-you rounds and relaxed streaming events and are looking forward to working together. We warmly welcome Kai, Paul, Brian, Ehsan, Amey, David, Christoph, Dennis, Umar, Selma, Lars, Fulya, David, Georg, Katharina, Frederik and Roy!
With the start of spring, we kicked off the barbecue season – digitally, of course! Smoking charcoal, a cold beer in hand and delicacies on the plate; that’s how we enjoyed ourselves last Friday and kicked off the weekend. Our colleagues turned out to be true barbecue gourmets and the live chat was flooded with skilfully designed food photos.
Even if none of this took place in person, we were able to laugh out loud together, toast and enjoy the company.
The introduction of the 5G mobile communications standard is opening up new business potential in industry and services. But how securely do time-critical applications function when switching between radio systems and how can the changeover from WiFi to pLTE networks or 5G networks be efficiently designed? A creative team from m3connect’s Cellular Solutions division has constructed a model car that m3connect is using to test the networking of industrial systems.
5G technology gives wirelessly connected manufacturing robots, transport systems or augmented reality applications the necessary reliability. It reduces latency to the range of milliseconds and enables data-intensive machine communication via radio – provided it is field-tested and works without interference, a claim that put the m3connect team on the map.
As small as the approximately 30 cm long model car is, its usefulness as a demonstration case for data transmission is enormous. Equipped with sensors, drive, steering and LTE modem, it offers all the prerequisites for tests and experiments on bidirectional real-time communication. On board are temperature, humidity and other sensors whose values are transmitted and processed as examples for other systems. GPS data, for example, can also be transported in the same way. The model is controlled via a computer or smartphone. Data is transmitted via the MQTT protocol, which also enables the cloud-based integration of IoT services.
The idea to build a model arose from the intensive work on concepts for the introduction of 5G in the automotive industry. The young specialists around Justin Eichenlaub, Head of Cellular Solutions at m3connect, wanted to condense previous experience and build a learning platform for the development of efficient implementation concepts. m3connect promotes creative projects like this and gives freedom for innovative ideas. Thus, our former intern Heba Kashkash laid the foundations for this project. Kai Mauckner, master’s student in electrical engineering at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences (HSD) and m3connect employee since 2021, subsequently implemented and supervised this project.
For Kai Mauckner, the model car proves the effectiveness of the m3connect concept: “Our model car is a demonstration case for wireless networking of industrial systems. We will use it to analyze the transitions and handovers in the radio system and show how the upgrades from pLTE to 5G work smoothly.”
Equipping companies with private LTE (pLTE) and 5G networks improves productivity and creates new dimensions of digitalization. The results from the project are incorporated into the networking concepts for industrial real-time communication developed by m3connect.
During the Corona crisis, hotels are looking for growth drivers and find them in the modernisation of their IT networks. A group of experts reported from practice at the Digital Forum of the Allgemeine Hotel- und Gastronomie-Zeitung in February. Emilio Dragas, CEO of m3connect, and Niklas Unger, Director of IT & Digital Business at B&B Hotels, explained how B&B Hotels drove the digitalisation of its properties. 1800 participants were interested in their insights regarding the change of the infrastructure at the virtual part of this year’s German Hotel Congress.
The rollout at B&B Hotels was preceded by an intensive conception phase. Before new processes and a new Property Management System (PMS) were established in 138 properties in less than 6 months, a new foundation had to be laid. “We first defined the requirements for the Future Network project together with B&B Hotels,” described Emilio Dragas from m3connect. “Therefore, we specified all the important goals such as high bandwidth and high-speed internet, redundancy and failover, performance monitoring and SLA transparency, security and the ability to provide applications and cloud services easily and quickly.” All of this needed to be available not only at existing hotels, but also at all new properties. “Our goal was to create a hotel out of a suitcase – that means, we are able to provide the complete infrastructure to every new hotel in the shortest possible time,” Emilio Dragas described.
Niklas Unger from B&B Hotels confirmed the head start that the networked infrastructure of m3connect enables: “A well-organized network creates the basis for further growth and for service-oriented processes from which the guest benefits.” As an example, he cited the cashless processing of services, which B&B Hotels is currently pushing forward in order to offer guests further added value.
Although the path of B&B Hotels with m3connect was confirmed as a sustainable model for hotel chains, the operators of individual businesses and holiday hotels still questioned how they could position themselves to follow the trend. They too “should take stock,” Emilio Dragas recommended. They too “would have to look at the whole in order to divide a big investment into several building blocks.”
At the end of the digital forum, it was clear that today’s investments in network infrastructure are tomorrow’s profits for hotels of all sizes.