Advanced Cabling Cleans Up in Hotels

Advanced Cabling Systems, the Little Rock firm that opened a Springdale office June 1, got the local contract to install high-speed voice and data cable infrastructure in five of John Q. Hammons Inc.’s hotels in Arkansas.

Michael Kennedy, Advanced Cabling’s business development director, said his firm has completed installations at Springdale’s Holiday Inn and Hampton Inn, as well as Russellville’s Holiday Inn and Little Rock’s Embassy Suites. Work at the Bentonville Holiday Inn Express is also in the final stages.

The project is more than a financial windfall for Advanced Cabling, which didn’t disclose the figures. It’s a major endorsement.

National Cash Register, the well known national logistics integrator, hired Advanced Cabling through its NCR Power & Cable division. NCR also contracted with a major broadband service provider, CAIS Internet, to handle Internet solutions at 48 Hammons properties. Kim Heinly, senior project manager for NCR Power & Cable, said ACS was nothing short of awesome.

“ACS was so good, I have asked to use them on a separate project,” Heinly said. “They were able to accommodate us on a day’s notice, and we ended up requesting their help at additional sites. They were excellent.”

Heinly said getting high-speed Internet access in the hotels will cost on average about $30,000 per 300- to 400-room hotel and takes about three weeks to complete. Multiply that times the 200 hotels that Hammons is outfitting with broadband Internet service nationwide, and that’s a $6 million initiative.

But it’s easy to see why Hammons is willing to spend the money. Adding Internet service is another revenue source hotels can take advantage of — especially in competitive markets like Northwest Arkansas.

A fee of $9.95 for 24 hours is billed to guests who log on, whether they use the service for one minute or the whole day.

“This allows hotels to promote themselves to high-tech companies that need access in both private and meeting rooms,” Kennedy said. “Now that everyone who’s traveling on business is walking into their room, hopping on laptops and dialing up their modems, hotels are getting so much Internet traffic that it bogs down the system.”

Installing Category V, ethernet data cable, Kennedy said, allows hotels to eliminate the burden all that traffic puts on their phone systems.

Kennedy said the infrastructure his firm has installed for the Hammons properties is the first of its kind in the state that adapts 10-baseT ethernet typology for hotels. The advantage is it lets hotels use their existing telephone wiring while providing customers with continually connected Internet access that doesn’t interrupt phone service.