With its clean modern architecture and state-of-the-art technology Loews Hotel, has become a fixture in the heart of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Aptitude provided technology integration oversight, design, and project management for this 23-story, 650,000 square-foot hotel and convention center. In order to help create a truly top-of-the-line experience, the team integrated structured cabling, digital signage, security, elevator and room access control systems, automated shades in guest rooms, emergency radio system, garage code blue phones, area of refuge, closed circuit television, and audiovisual throughout a building with several ballrooms and a 16-panel TV wall in the lobby.
Most hotels of comparable size require a data closet on every floor of the building in order to support the needed technology. Using an innovative new product – Software Defined Local Area Network fiber (SD-LAN) – instead of traditional copper cabling for network infrastructure enabled Loews to significantly consolidate space, reduce overall costs, and still provide excellent bandwidth to meet the needs of a busy hotel hosting hundreds of guests and events. Ultimately, there were only three data closets needed to support guest room technology throughout 21 floors. In each of the data closets, there are two strands of fiber that power communications and two strands of copper that power access node and POE devices for each guest room in the hotel.
