Table of Contents
- What is network assurance, and why is it important?
- Why are new tools needed to assist human network managers in this role?
- How can AI and machine learning help improve the guest network experience?
- What is a good example of this kind of network assurance tool?
What is network assurance, and why is it important?
In the simplest sense, network assurance means ensuring your network performs well and is reliable and secure. In practice, this involves monitoring and managing your network to deliver a consistently great user experience.
Hotel guests have come to expect that they will have reliable high-speed Internet access throughout their stay. Business guests require a stable and secure connection for work, and leisure travelers depend on connectivity for entertainment and communication. This means offering seamless connectivity throughout your property at all times.
While a great Internet experience can be a differentiator, so too can a bad experience – network issues and slow connections can lead to complaints and the loss of revenue. Not only that, but a guest network that isn’t working well will require staff to expend time and effort to get it fixed. This takes attention away from revenue-producing tasks and may lead to dissatisfied guests, negative reviews, and the loss of future business.
A well-performing network is also crucial for your business functions. Essential items such as PMS, POS, meetings and events, smart solutions, and more depend on reliable connectivity. And with hotels handling an increasing amount of sensitive guest information, maintaining robust security is crucial.
Network assurance is thus necessary to safeguard the performance and security of your network. A reliable, secure network contributes positively to your overall guest experience and your hotel’s operational efficiency.
Why are new tools needed to assist human network managers in this role?
Network assurance used to be considered a very basic IT role: As long as your network worked and wasn’t getting routinely hacked, it might be good enough. But that’s no longer the case. Network managers need to be sure that the network stays up and running with good performance and security.
As networks get larger and more complex and threats become more widespread and diverse, it gets harder and harder to keep ahead of potential problems that can affect performance and security. Forget finding a needle in a haystack – finding the one access point that’s about to go down can be like finding a bent needle in a stack of straight needles! There are just too many things to keep an eye on for a human network manager to do all of this without help.
This is where newer tools incorporating AI and machine learning come in. AI and machine learning offer advanced capabilities beyond what humans can do by themselves, providing insights, recommendations, and even predictions and preemptive action to keep your guest network running smoothly.
How can AI and machine learning help improve the guest network experience?
AI and machine learning can significantly enhance the performance of your guest network, as well as your back-office network. Some aspects that AI and machine learning can help address include:
- Traffic analysis and network optimization – By learning usage patterns, AI can dynamically optimize network configuration.
- Resource allocation – AI can also allocate resources (such as bandwidth and applications) dynamically based on current demand. It can also prioritize critical applications, ensuring bandwidth is distributed appropriately to meet guests’ needs.
- Predictive analysis and proactive maintenance – Through historical data analysis, AI can identify patterns that precede network problems. It can then predict potential issues before they occur and even perform proactive maintenance to reduce downtime.
- Quality of Service (QoS) – AI can monitor service quality continuously, making real-time adjustments as needed to meet predefined quality standards.
- Anomaly and threat detection – AI can monitor network behavior to identify security threats and other anomalies in real time. AI can also take action automatically to protect the network and guest data from an ever-increasing variety of cybersecurity threats.
- Automated troubleshooting – AI can quickly identify and resolve network issues, using automated responses to improve network performance without human intervention.
While human network managers are necessary to determine and implement policies and standards, they can’t always spot potential problems before they occur. It can also be difficult for humans to make real-time adjustments that optimize network performance. AI and machine learning can better perform these tasks for a consistently better guest network experience. They can also scale efficiently as networks grow and become more complex.
What is a good example of this kind of network assurance tool?
cnMaestro X Assurance from Cambium Networks offers zero-touch end-to-end network management. This tool uses AI and machine learning for troubleshooting and analytics to improve the user experience and spot potential security vulnerabilities. By gathering and analyzing data from client connections and network devices, it discovers success and failure patterns. It can also monitor network health, provide contextual failure analysis, and identify root causes. Using this tool, network managers can more easily identify and fix potential trouble spots for an improved experience.
WorldVue works with Cambium Networks to provide customized network solutions for guest-centric properties seeking an improved connectivity experience for guests. If you’re looking to improve your guest network, give us a call- we’d love to help create just the right solution for your property!