iBAHN has announced a major expansion to
its EMEA network. The upgrade is designed to further strengthen iBAHN’s
proprietary worldwide network, which is already the most technically
advanced available to the hospitality industry.

The network developments focus on iBAHN’s Point of Presence (POPs) in
Frankfurt and London. iBAHN has moved its London POP to a higher
standard facility that allows all major data circuits entering the POP
to be expanded, in answer to the continued demand for bandwidth,
geographical expansion and iBAHN’s advanced converged services.

Each POP will be connected to iBAHN’s major telecommunications partners’
networks, offering full resilience against failures and allowing
hoteliers to present an unrivalled quality of service to their
customers.

iBAHN’s continued investment in its network reflects the explosion in
demand for online content, which has seen the amount of data that it
handles increase five times over the last three years. This equates to
1.9 petabytes of data (nearly 2000 terabytes) or the equivalent of a
book with more than 400 billion pages of data.

The data upsurge has been caused by the continued evolution of
bandwidth-heavy applications such as iPods, VOIP, movies and online TV
channels, which will be further exploited as more High Definition
content is made available. These services are all essential to the
majority of hotel guests, but place huge pressures on hotelier’s
networks.

Neil Williams, director of EMEA Operations at iBAHN, comments: “The
completion of iBAHN’s network expansion marks the end of nine months of
work. The new network design offers much greater level of resilience and
flexibility, and opens up an unrivalled level of capacity for our
customers. At iBAHN, we are leading the industry in digital convergence
and our network strength is the backbone to every service that we
offer.”

Upgrades to the network will also allow new converged services to be
developed and launched such as building and property management,
environmental control integration and security systems.

Currently, more than 40 iBAHN installed hotels offer between 10 and
100mb data lines, and as a result of the network expansion iBAHN will be
able to offer hoteliers a wide range of cost, capacity and reliability
benefits through its service offering. These include: Direct to
Internet, Tunnelled On-net, IP-VPN over MPLS and Ethernet, and multiple
delivery technologies such as ADSL, SDSL, E1 and fibre. 
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