Installing a hotel phone system requires good preparation and planning.
Installing a hotel phone system is achievable as a do-it-yourself project and dramatically reduces costs of hiring professional fitters. According to ICT industry expert and consultant Paul White in an interview conducted specifically for this article, the most important criteria for an hotelier to consider for hotel installations are compatibility between the phone system and billing software, the capability to accommodate business expansion and the return-on-investment percentage of the phone system equipment. With the right planning and preparation, a hotel phone installation project is straightforward and effective.
Instructions
1. Decide where to locate the phone system unit. Commonly, position the unit in a back-of-house office or IT room. Remember that cabling runs from the unit to telephone sites, so placing the unit near to the cabling channels of other services saves time and money on cable length routing.
2. Contact your local phone service provider and order the number of outside phone lines you require. The provider installs these lines for you, and you can ask it to bring the lines into the room where you site the phone system unit.
3. Position a computer with Pentium-level processing power near the phone system unit. Dedicate the computer to the phone system to handle the phone billing software, and in this way you do not need an expensive PC. Install the phone billing software onto the computer. Link the computer to a printer so that the phone billing software prints out bills for phone use for each hotel room.
4. Use established service channels to run the phone cabling and reduce installation costs.
Run the multicore cable from the phone system unit into a channel that sites cabling and pipes for other services. Choose a distribution point for the cabling so that from here it splits off to each hotel room. Use grade-1 cabling for telephone lines or grade-5 cabling if you want to run IP services with the telephones.
5. Use insulation displacement connectors to connect hotel room cables at the socket terminal points. These have an interference fit and quickly push in to grip and expose the cable. Fit telephone socket housing to the wall over the terminal points. Position the telephone near the phone socket and connect the phone cable into the phone socket in the wall.
6. Plug the phone system electrical plug into an electric socket. Connect the external phone line cables into the phone sockets that your phone service provider installed. Connect a suitable cable from the phone system unit to the computer. Use an RS232 cable for an analog or digital phone system or an Ethernet cable for an IP phone system. Plug the multicore cable into the phone system unit to connect up the whole hotel phone system.
