What we see for the future of hotel rooms...

Wifirst partners with Panasonic to showcase the advanced “Room Area Network” for Hospitality in the BlackFire Innovation, a co-innovation building designed by Caesars Entertainment and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

Black Fire Innovation, Designing the future of hospitality 

Opening in early 2020 and located in Las Vegas, the BlackFire Innovation's purpose is to drive the future of Hospitality, Gaming and Entertainment featuring the best of technology in a replica resort, with software development spaces and business acceleration activities. 

As part of this mission to help accelerate product development life cycles of emerging technologies, BlackFire Innovation partners with the leading technology companies including Panasonic, who invited Wifirst to showcase its “Room Area Network” solution with their professional display in the Hospitality showroom for four years.

Connecting the hotel room of the future

Traditional Hospitality Wi-Fi is based on an open network with captive portal authentication. The challenge presented with an open network is that it provides malicious users with easy access to illegally obtain data from other devices connected to the network. This causes further challenges and complexities when introducing any form of IoT device into the environment

Wifirst breaks through this boundary by providing a true home-from-home WiFi experience called Room Area Network (RAN). The RAN allows guests to easily and securely interact with IoT devices found in their hotel room environment, as well as other authorized devices, in a safe and secure way thanks to WPA2/3 encryption.

In fact, Wifirst’s continuous investments in WiFi technology allow making it the robust and efficient technical base capable of providing the multitude of digital services expected by hotel customers, with an easy-to-use user journey for all. 

At BlackFire InnovationTM, Wifirst and Panasonic go further, showcasing the guest room of the near future, equipped with a scalable and customizable content platform, based on the Apple Home Kit solution, that delivers an always more engaging, interactive and immersive end-user experience.

Example of use for a smooth and secure journey 

It is 12:30 pm, you check in remotely via the hotels' smartphone app, you have direct access to the IoT ecosystem of your room and can adjust the features connected remotely,like the heating or air conditioning. As soon as you get into your room, you can take advantage of its features directly via the Home application of your Apple terminal without any additional connection steps: HomePod, WiFi speaker or TV compatible with AirPlay2 or ChromeCast. And voila, you simply stream the content of your choice on the TV in your room.