255 Access Points, Installed Without Closing a Villa

Dubai Marine Beach Resort & Spa sits at the start of Jumeirah Beach Road: 34 villas, three restaurants, a spa, a fitness centre, private pools and two floodlit tennis courts. It is also an older property, and that is where the difficulty started.

The buildings had no standard ducts or containment to run cables through. The villas had complex layouts and, critically, no riser shafts — which is the single hardest constraint you can hand a structured cabling team. Getting Cat6 to where the access points needed to be meant creating routes that did not exist.

And none of it could disrupt a guest. The resort stayed open throughout, running at over 70% occupancy. Guests were paying premium rates for a quiet beachfront villa while we ran fibre to it.

• No standard ducts or containment anywhere in the property
• No riser shafts in the villas — the toughest part of the Cat6 cabling
• Live property at 70%+ occupancy for the duration of the works
• Substantial civil works needed on a fully operational resort
• Coverage required outdoors too — pools, beach and walkways

We ran fibre from the main distribution frame directly to each villa, each outlet and the admin areas, and built the intermediate distribution frames the property had never had — bringing the resort up to proper networking standards rather than patching around their absence.

Inside the villas, ceilings were cut and re-fixed to route the Cat6, using existing openings wherever possible so that drilling and noise stayed to a minimum. Villa availability was coordinated daily with the front of house and IT teams, so the crew always worked in an empty villa and never alongside a guest. That coordination is why a 90-man-day programme on a live resort produced no guest disruption.

On top went 802.11ac indoor access points throughout the interiors and Wi-Fi 6 outdoor access points across the pools, beach and walkways, with a wireless controller, gateway and captive portal management system behind them. Guests already checked in authenticate against the hotel PMS; visitors who have not checked in get access after entering basic contact details — so the beach bar and the restaurants work for walk-ins too.

• Fibre run from the MDF to every villa, outlet and admin area
• IDFs created to bring the property up to networking standards
• Ceilings cut and re-fixed using existing openings to minimise disruption
• 802.11ac indoors, Wi-Fi 6 outdoors for pools, beach and walkways
• PMS-integrated authentication for guests, contact capture for visitors
• Daily villa-by-villa scheduling with front of house, MEP and IT

The resort now runs a single network supporting more than 5,000 concurrent guest devices with full BYOD, alongside corporate users, point of sale, kitchen printers and every member of resort staff. It also carries the building itself — fridges, heating and cooling, laundry, carts and environmental sensors all sit on the same managed infrastructure.

Because guests are identified individually at login, the resort recognises a returning guest and reconnects them automatically on their next stay. That is the groundwork for what comes next: location-based services, automatic check-in, and personalisation based on guest history and stated preferences.

• 255 access points across villas, public areas, pools and beach
• 5,000+ concurrent guest devices with full BYOD support
• Delivered on schedule on a live property, with no guest disruption
• POS, kitchen printers, staff and IoT all on one managed network
• Returning guests recognised and reconnected automatically