Lime Wood Hotel | Fibre installation project
Project objectives
About Lime Wood Hotel
The Lime Wood Group and Home Grown Hotels are a collection of high-end hotels and restaurants that share a joint goal of providing their guests with a luxury experience. The Lime Wood Hotel is one of the group’s most famous luxury lifestyle hotels, located in the beautiful New Forest National Park.
Having opened its doors in 2009, the five-star hotel has truly earned its place as one of the top country house hotels in the UK. DuoCall has spent the last 5 years helping with all of the Lime Wood Hotel’s communications and technology projects, from mobile phone deployments to our recent fibre installation project.
Customers interested in the Lime Wood Hotel (or any of the other Home Grown Hotels locations) can book their stays online or by calling their reception. Whether you’d like a room to stay in, restaurant to eat at, dream wedding location or a relaxing spa package, the Lime Wood Hotel will provide you with an experience you will never forget.
The requirement
The Lime Wood Hotel wanted to replace their existing internet connectivity solution after five years of using an underperforming connection that wasn’t providing the speed and connectivity needed to run the property. In the area, small business-based products were available, which included solutions such as FTTC, however, this was not fast enough to meet the needs of the Lime Wood Hotel.
To try and improve connectivity further the hotel installed four 4G mobile antennas. Conversely, these couldn’t cope in a large multi-user environment.
As the demand for a good quality and fast internet connection grew, customer feedback regarding poor connection speeds began to add up. The property director understood that this couldn’t continue and turned to DuoCall for a solution.
Dedication to resourcefulness
Due to its remote location, installing a fibre solution to the Lime Wood Hotel was no easy task. But after five years of dedication and resourcefulness, we managed to find a solution.
“Due to the location of Lime Wood Hotel, connectivity has been a real challenge for us over the years. Our previous internet solution was sub-par, making it difficult for our team to manage our operations and run the hotel fluidly.
We turned to DuoCall as we’ve worked closely with them on many successful projects across all of our locations. They proposed a complete overhaul of our connectivity setup and recommended we install a dedicated fibre connection to ensure maximum speeds.
Now that the install is complete and we have a full-blown fibre connection in place, Lime Wood Hotel is now operating at maximum efficiency and our guests are enjoying the internet speeds they come to expect from a 5-star establishment like Lime Wood Hotel. We couldn’t be happier with the outcome.”
Vikki Jerram
Finance Director | Lime Wood Hotel
Our solution
Over the previous five years, DuoCall has been working with the Lime Wood Hotel and local network providers to install a dedicated fibre connection to the hotel’s premises. The initial plans that were proposed involved using Beaulieu Road as a route from the exchange to the hotel. However, two plans were rejected by the local authority.
Luckily, another one of the hotel’s projects involved using the same road to connect the hotel to the local mains sewage line. Whilst this project was also dismissed, it opened doors for a private group including DuoCall, local landowners and the Forestry Commission to collaborate and plan a new project together.
The new project involved the use of mole drilling machines to dig a route underneath a pathway that led from the Lime Wood Hotel grounds to Lyndhurst, where mains sewage could be accessed. The next step was identifying a POP (point of presence) for our network services, which needed to be routed independently from the sewage line.
It was agreed that we would connect our fibre tubing to the mole machine, alongside the sewage mains. The process of drilling was very complicated and required specialist, third party companies to design, plan and implement the work. It was essential that the site was protected at all times.
The drilling was a patient process, taking two to three months to be completed. Once the route was on the hotel’s land, we could route fibre cabling to the comms room inside the property.
When the tubing was in place and connected to the relevant termination points, a machine was used to move the fibre through the tubing. This is a process known as fibre blowing. This allowed for a complete fibre connection from point A to B.
To complete the project, we set about installing a 1GB leased line at Lime Wood Hotel HQ in addition to the 200mb leased line already serving their operation (also provided by DuoCall MSP). This not only catered for the hotel’s data requirements, but it also offered them a disaster recovery solution too.
What is fibre blowing?
Fibre blowing is the process of funnelling fibre cables through a ducting pipe using compressed air. Carried by the drag from the air, the cable is lifted into the airstream and away from the walls of the tubing. This allows for the cable to be blown through the ducting pipe. There’s usually no trouble with fibre making it through the tube, even on tight corners.
Fibre blowing not only simplifies the planning stages of a project, it speeds up the fibre installation process and reduces costs too.
Key benefits
Outcome
The Lime Wood Hotel fibre connection project has had a very positive outcome. Through collaboration with local landowners and the Forestry Commission, the hotel now has a reliable solution to their long-term problems. It’s taken extensive planning and work, but here at DuoCall we’re passionate about going above and beyond for our customers. We’re over the moon with the outcome and we couldn’t be prouder of the DuoCall staff who have worked tirelessly on this project from start to finish.
With speeds of 1GB and a 200mb backup, Lime Wood Hotel can now operate with the speed and efficiency they’ve been dreaming of for the past five years.
