First there was the photo-taking-spy-pen, then the USB hub-coffee-mug-warmer, now it's time for TV WiFi Access Points (APs)! I wonder what other multi-function magic our friends in the East will come up with... but if history is anything to go by, it probably won't work!

Trying to combine the functionality of two or more distinct devices is bound to fail.  These kind of projects usually end up with something which kind-of does both functions, but can't do either of the functions well enough to be usable.  Would you use a cameraphone for professional sports photography?

The current fad being pushed by hospitality vendors is to implement WiFi access points (APs) inside TVs.  The sales pitch is simple:  "You need a TV set in each guest room anyway.  The TV set has power, and has some form of connectivity to a central location to receive the TV signal.  We just bolt on some chips and antennas and voila, a WiFi access point (AP) in each room!".  To the clueless hospitality salesperson, this is one of those why-hasn't-anyone-done-it-before moments, but to engineers like us, this is just bonkers.  Here's why...

A TV is designed to show pictures

No more, no less.  First of all, those WiFi circuits are in there only because TV manufacturers want an easy way for home users to connect their TVs to their home routers and watch YouTube clips or Netflix/Hulu movies or browse Facebook on the telly..  but that's the TV making a connection to the router, it's one connection - TV to WiFi router - and then it is only competing against a couple of laptops, phones and a tablet or two. What these 'hospitality TVs' are doing is the complete opposite! They are using the same circuitry, electronics and antennas to receive connections from the guest's devices, and they doing this in an environment with potentially tens or hundreds of devices within 'earshot'.

The horsepower in these systems is nowhere near capable enough to handle multiple connections, let alone provide reliable, predictable, fast connectivity to all of them!

Professional WiFi vendors like Ruckus Wireless spend a large chunk of their R&D budgets on their AP's antenna systems, the RF components and the software to make sure each WiFi device is connected in the best possible way, and that any misbehaving WiFi devices are kept off your network.  TV manufacturer's primary concern is with the image quality, and the TV watching experience - WiFi is just a bolted-on afterthought.

Coax is for Video, CAT5 is for Data

Most hotels have no CAT5/CAT6 cabling going into the rooms, so the solution offered by these hospitality geniuses is to use the Coax (ie. antenna) cable to pipe internet to the TV... so, so bad.  You see, the last time Coax cable was used for data was back in the 1980's when the internet didn't really exist and bad fashion sense was the order of the day... And just like MC Hammer and shoulder-pads, network engineers look back at the time and wonder what the hell we were thinking!

The main reason why Coax is not suitable for data is that it's a shared medium.  The best-of-the-best Coax-based data distribution systems use the EuroDOCSIS 3 protocol, which in a best-case scenario has a capacity of 400Mbps downstream and 108Mbps upstream (in reality it is much less than that).  It sounds impressive, especially when you consider that your internet connection is probably much slower than that.  Aha, but you forgot the shared medium bit! So let's do some good old number-crunching:

A hotel has 200 rooms.  Each room has a fancy AP-TV.  Each AP-TV offers WiFi and wired network connectivity to the guest, that equates to 400 ports. 

So on each device, each guest can achieve a maximum of....

400Mbps / 400 ports = 1Mbps downstream
108Mbps / 400 ports = 0.27Mbps upstream

Here's a nice table for comparison

Remember, this is the best-case scenario, which never translates to reality.  Now I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking "not all of my guests will be using the maximum bandwidth at the same time. If they do, my internet connection will be the bottleneck!" - Wrong! Since it's a shared medium, EuroDOCSIS has to allocate bandwidth to each connected device (ie. the TV, even if it's on standby).  Even if only 1 room out of the 200 is occupied, that 1 room is still sharing the internet pipe just as though it was being used to the max by the other 199 rooms!  See how ridiculous that is?  Do you really want to invest thousands of Euros into a platform which can only give your guests a 1990's internet experience? 

Two's a crowd, Three's a party

.. so what's 200 then?  When it's TV's with built-in WiFi, it's a mess that's what it is!

Most legacy Hotel TV setups (the ones that just show pictures and PayTV) are fairly static.  When it is installed, the TV is set up with a list of channels, a volume limit and maybe a nice start up picture.  It really is a set-it-once-and-forget-until-it-blows-up setup.  This means that most TV systems have no centralised management.  If you want to add a channel, you must go into each room and add the channel to each TV manually.  Because of all the manual work, one or two TVs may be missing a channel or two, but that doesn't happen often enough to be a problem.

However, when you transpose this to WiFi, you open up a whole new can of worms.  A single misconfigured AP could drive guests insane with partial or total disconnections or cause your entire HSIA WiFi and Wired network to fail!  Also, APs in close proximity to each other (ie. in nearby rooms) need to work together to make sure they do not interfere with one another.  With a TV-based AP there is no central control, no central coordination.  Each AP is its own tiny island in a sea jam packed with unpredictable swells and uncoordinated ships.

Divided we stand, united we fall

This is what TV-AP providers won't tell you.  To convince you, they will give you a TV-AP to test in your environment.  This will obviously work fine as it is the only device in your network, but it doesn't scale.  If you really want to consider this option, ask them to visit and test a large hotel having exactly the same setup in production, with a couple of hundred rooms.

The real solution to a trouble-free guest experience for TV and HSIA connectivity is to split the two services. IPTV has no real benefit to hotels (more on that in another post!), so keep that TV signal on the Coax, but keep all your HSIA guest internet traffic on CAT5/CAT6 cabling.  Investing in both gives you added peace of mind while also future-proofing your investment for future technologies.