Telecom & IT Advisory for Hospitality Organizations

What makes hospitality telecom uniquely complex

Most industries need internet and phones. Hotels need all of that plus a dozen more systems that depend on connectivity in ways that directly affect the guest experience and, in some cases, guest safety. When you inventory a typical full-service hotel's telecom footprint, you find: high-density guest WiFi across every room and public space, a PMS (Property Management System) tightly integrated with the phone system for room charges and wake-up calls, in-room phones running on a legacy PBX that's often 15 or more years old, dedicated circuits for point-of-sale and credit card processing, separate network segments for security cameras and access control, POTS lines for elevators, fire alarm panels, pool alarms, and emergency phones, and at properties with conference or event space, bandwidth demands that spike dramatically during conventions and corporate meetings.

Each of these has its own vendor, its own integration dependencies, and its own failure mode. When they work, guests don't notice. When they don't, the front desk hears about it immediately — and so does management.

ITG Group has been working with hospitality clients since our founding in 2001. We know which carriers have strong hotel-segment support, which PBX vendors' SIP implementations cause problems during carrier transitions, and where the POTS replacement timeline is most urgent in Pacific Northwest markets. That institutional knowledge reduces project risk and shortens timelines significantly compared to starting from scratch with a carrier sales rep who has never worked a hotel account.

Guest WiFi is a particularly important area. It has evolved from a premium amenity to a baseline expectation — and in many hotel reviews, it's one of the top-rated or lowest-rated elements of the stay. Getting guest WiFi right means specifying enough backhaul capacity, choosing the right access point density for your floor plans, segmenting guest traffic from operational traffic, and having a carrier circuit that can handle simultaneous peak usage from every room. Getting it wrong produces the kind of online reviews that take months to recover from.

PMS integration is another area where we see persistent problems. Opera, Cloudbeds, Maestro, and the other major PMS platforms each have specific requirements for how they communicate with the phone system — for room charges, for wake-up call scheduling, for DID assignment when guests check in. Those integrations break when carriers change trunking technology, when a PBX is replaced without proper PMS testing, or when a hotel migrates to a cloud-based PMS and discovers the legacy phone system can't speak the right protocol. We've untangled all of these scenarios and know what to test before any carrier or phone system change goes live.

The POTS problem in hospitality

Traditional Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) copper lines are being eliminated by carriers across the country. The FCC order that began the PSTN transition in 2019 gave carriers broad latitude to discontinue copper-based services, and the major carriers — AT&T, Lumen, Frontier — are actively sunsetting POTS in market after market. For most businesses, this is an inconvenience. For hotels, it's a safety and compliance issue.

Elevators are required by most building codes and AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) standards to have a two-way emergency communication system — and for decades that meant a POTS line in the elevator pit. Fire alarm panels in hotels often use POTS as the primary reporting path to the central monitoring station, with a cellular backup as secondary. Emergency phones in parking garages, along outdoor walkways, and at pool areas frequently depend on POTS. And some older pool and mechanical systems have alarm dialers that were installed in the 1990s and have never been touched since.

When a carrier discontinues POTS at a property, all of these systems are simultaneously at risk. We've seen hotel operators get 30-day POTS discontinuation notices from carriers and discover they had 40-plus lines to migrate — with no inventory of what each line did.

The replacement options depend on the specific equipment. The most common approaches are:

• ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) devices: A small device that connects to the existing analog phone or alarm panel on one side and a SIP trunk or broadband connection on the other. Well-suited for elevators and emergency phones where the analog handset isn't going to be replaced. Requires testing and, for fire panels, usually requires a visit from the alarm company to certify the new path.
• Cellular backup units: Devices that use LTE or 5G to complete calls without any wireline circuit. Appropriate for locations where running new cable is impractical, and for applications where the call volume is extremely low (fire panel test calls, elevator emergency calls) and latency isn't critical.
• VoIP gateways: For properties replacing an older analog PBX with a modern IP-based system, a VoIP gateway can connect legacy analog endpoints — including alarm panels — to the new SIP infrastructure. This approach centralizes management but requires the PBX to be properly spec'd to handle the analog endpoints.

The timeline matters. In some markets, carriers are providing less than 90 days' notice before POTS disconnection. We help hospitality clients get ahead of this by inventorying every analog line, mapping it to the right replacement technology, coordinating with the AHJ where required, and executing the transition before the carrier forces the issue.

Right-sizing bandwidth for hotels

Bandwidth planning for hotels is different from bandwidth planning for offices because the peak demand profile is harder to predict and the consequences of underprovisioning are more visible. A 200-room hotel at 90% occupancy during a weekend corporate convention has a fundamentally different bandwidth profile than the same property at 40% leisure occupancy on a weeknight.

The variables that drive bandwidth requirements for a hotel include: average number of simultaneous guest devices per occupied room (typically 3–5 in business-traveler properties, 2–3 in leisure), whether the property hosts conferences or events with their own AV and streaming requirements, the bandwidth consumed by IP security cameras on the operational network, the PMS and POS system traffic, staff communications (UCaaS, email, operational apps), and any streaming services or IPTV the hotel provides for in-room entertainment.

A reasonable baseline for a 200-room full-service property is 500Mbps to 1Gbps of symmetrical internet capacity on the primary circuit, with a secondary circuit — typically a cable or LTE failover — dedicated to the front desk, POS, and PMS traffic. The secondary circuit exists so that a single carrier outage doesn't stop check-ins and checkouts even if the primary circuit is down.

For conference-heavy properties, we model peak event bandwidth separately and size the pipe for the worst-case scenario: a full-house convention where every attendee is on the hotel WiFi during a general session break. Undersizing bandwidth for a conference center means the hotel gets the blame for slow internet even when the real problem is that the carrier circuit was never spec'd for the actual load.

Seasonal demand spikes are also a real factor for resort properties. A ski resort in peak season has radically different bandwidth requirements than the same property in mud season. We help operators decide whether to build to peak (overpaying when occupancy is low) or use a burstable circuit structure that lets them scale up when needed without paying for capacity they don't use year-round.

What ITG Group does for hospitality clients

Our engagements with hotel and resort operators typically cover the following areas. The starting point is almost always a free audit:

1. Telecom audit and billing recovery — We review every carrier invoice, validate circuit inventory against what's actually installed, and flag billing errors. Hotels with multiple properties and multiple carriers are particularly prone to phantom circuits, misclassified service tiers, and auto-renewed contracts at above-market rates.
2. POTS line inventory and replacement planning — We catalog every analog line by function and location, assess the urgency of replacement given the carrier's POTS sunset timeline in your market, and specify the right replacement technology for each use case. We coordinate with elevator companies, fire alarm contractors, and the AHJ where required.
3. Bandwidth right-sizing and carrier RFP — We model your actual bandwidth requirements based on occupancy data and peak demand scenarios, run a competitive RFP across carriers with strong hotel-segment coverage in your market, and negotiate contracts with appropriate SLAs and burst provisions.
4. PBX/UCaaS transition support — If you're replacing an aging PBX with a cloud-based phone system or hosted UCaaS, we manage the carrier transition (new SIP trunks, DID porting, analog fallback for critical lines) and coordinate the PMS integration testing so the property doesn't go live with a broken wake-up call system.
5. Multi-property management — For hotel groups and management companies with multiple properties, we provide centralized carrier management: a single point of contact for billing disputes, service changes, and contract renewals across the entire portfolio. We also look for consolidation opportunities that reduce the number of carrier relationships the group has to manage.
6. Vendor consolidation — Hotels often have four or five carrier relationships that evolved over time without coordination. We assess whether consolidation makes sense operationally and financially, and when it does, we manage the transition to a smaller, more coherent carrier set.

The recurring problems we find in hospitality telecom

• Legacy PBX on expired maintenance agreements: The phone system in a 150-room property was often installed when the property was built or last renovated. It's been running for 15 years, the original vendor may no longer support it, and the hotel is paying month-to-month for maintenance from a third-party who's doing their best with aging hardware. When a carrier transition forces a SIP migration, the PBX may not be able to participate — requiring a replacement that wasn't in the budget.
• Guest WiFi infrastructure that wasn't designed for density: Wireless networks installed five or ten years ago were often designed for the device counts of that era. One or two devices per room is very different from five or six. Properties that haven't refreshed their WiFi infrastructure are delivering a degraded experience to guests who are comparing it against the WiFi they get at newer competitors.
• Auto-renewed carrier contracts at above-market rates: Hospitality operators are busy, and telecom contract renewals don't make the top of the priority list. The incumbent carrier knows this. We regularly find hotel groups paying rates that are 25–40% above current market because a contract auto-renewed without a competitive process. The carrier had no reason to offer a better price unprompted.
• PMS-PBX integration broken after a carrier change: A property switches carriers — often for good cost reasons — and discovers after the fact that the SIP trunking configuration on the new carrier doesn't match what the PBX expects for PMS integration. Room charge posting stops working, wake-up calls stop working, or check-in DID assignment breaks. These are fixable but they require someone who knows both the carrier configuration and the PMS integration layer.
• No secondary circuit for critical operations: Many hotels have a single internet connection. When it goes down, the front desk, POS, and door lock systems all go down with it. A simple failover circuit — often a cable business internet connection or an LTE backup — costs $100–$200/month and provides meaningful protection against single-carrier outages.
• Unknown POTS line inventory: Ask most hotel engineering teams how many POTS lines are in the building and you'll get an approximate answer at best. The actual inventory, once we pull the bills and walk the property, is usually larger and more varied than anyone knew. Lines that nobody remembers ordering for applications that nobody can identify are billing every month.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do we handle elevator and fire panel POTS lines during carrier transitions?

Elevator, fire alarm panel, and emergency phone POTS lines require a planned replacement before your carrier discontinues traditional POTS service — and most carriers are actively sunsetting it. The replacement options are ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) devices that convert the analog signal to VoIP, cellular-based backup units that use LTE/5G rather than a copper pair, and in some cases direct IP connections if the panel firmware supports it. The critical constraint is that the replacement must be certified by the equipment manufacturer and, in many jurisdictions, signed off by the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) before it can go live. We help you inventory every POTS line by function, map it to the correct replacement technology, and coordinate the transition so nothing goes offline without a tested alternative in place.

What bandwidth is right for a 200-room hotel?

A 200-room property should generally plan for at least 500Mbps–1Gbps of symmetrical internet capacity when you account for simultaneous guest WiFi usage, back-of-house operations, PMS traffic, IP security cameras, and streaming. The actual number depends on your occupancy profile, whether you host conferences or events, and how demanding your guests are — a business-traveler property has different peak behavior than a leisure resort. We run a proper bandwidth model using occupancy data and peak utilization before specifying anything, and we always spec backup connectivity (a secondary cable or LTE failover) for the front desk and POS circuits so a single carrier outage doesn't stop check-ins.

Can we consolidate our guest WiFi and business internet onto one carrier?

You can run them on the same physical carrier circuit, but they should remain on separate network segments — guest traffic, staff traffic, PMS/POS traffic, and security/operational systems each belong on isolated VLANs with appropriate bandwidth allocation and access controls. Consolidating to a single carrier can reduce costs and simplify billing, but the network segmentation work is non-negotiable for PCI compliance and operational security. We help you spec the VLAN architecture, select the right carrier and circuit type, and ensure the underlying infrastructure supports proper traffic isolation before anything gets consolidated.

How do we maintain PBX continuity during a phone system upgrade?

PBX transitions in an occupied hotel are operationally sensitive because front desk, housekeeping, and guest room phones all depend on the same system. The standard approach is a parallel cutover: the new system runs alongside the old one, with both connected to carrier trunks, until the new system is fully validated and staff are trained. We plan the cutover around low-occupancy windows, maintain analog fallback for critical lines (front desk, emergency phones) throughout the transition, and stay on the bridge call through go-live. For properties moving from a legacy PBX to a cloud UCaaS platform, we also handle the SIP trunk sourcing and PMS integration so those don't become separate project tracks.