— Structured Cabling · Hospitality
Mid-scale hotel — 200 drops across 5 floors
Problem. A 5-floor 80-room hotel needs Cat6A drops for guest-room TV / IPTV + Wi-Fi + housekeeping handheld, plus public-area AP and CCTV, terminating to per-floor IDFs.
Answer. Roughly 200 drops total at an average 25 m run-length per IDF lands at ~5000 m of cable, 5 floor IDFs and a central MDF — the estimator returns a cable-cost envelope and the rack-unit budget per closet.
02 / In depth
How this preset reads — the engineering view.
Hotel cabling is a topology problem: per-floor IDFs feeding back to a central MDF, with floor IDFs carrying the local drops and the MDF carrying fibre uplinks. The estimator approximates the cable envelope; the actual deployment slices that across the floor IDFs.
This preset assumes ~200 total drops — 80 rooms × 2 drops (IPTV + housekeeping/POE), plus public-area AP and CCTV — with an average 25 m run from drop to nearest IDF. Cat6A is recommended for new builds; Cat6 is acceptable for short-term refurbs.
Critical engineering notes the calculator can't surface: per-floor IDF UPS sizing (use UPS Runtime), fibre backbone (multi-mode OM4 for short backbone, single-mode for runs > 300 m), POE budget per AP (use POE Budget), and the cable management discipline that determines whether the closet stays serviceable in year five.
Hotels have a hidden cabling axis: the property management system / door-lock / minibar integration adds dedicated cabling routes that the estimator's user-drop count does not include. Plan to add 10–20 % for back-of-house systems.
What this preset deliberately does not solve
- Per-floor IDF topology is mandatory above ~30 drops per floor — the estimator gives the aggregate, not the slice.
- PMS / door-lock / BMS cabling routes are not in the user-drop count.
- Fibre backbone and UPS sizing are separate, mandatory line items.
How this preset differs from its siblings
The office-50-drops sibling preset solves a single-rack, single-floor problem where the estimator's aggregate cable figure is also the deployment figure. This preset's distinguishing complication is the multi-floor topology: 5 floor IDFs + 1 MDF, a fibre backbone between them, per-floor UPS sizing, and the hotel-specific back-of-house cabling (PMS, door-lock, BMS) that the user-drop count does not include. The single-rack preset is a cable-and-jack tool problem; this one is a building-services topology problem the calculator approximates.
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Brief us on the project — with this configuration.
Presets are a typology starting point. The brief wizard captures the room geometry, programme and constraints we need to translate this configuration into a real design.