The Imperial Pacific Resort Hotel is a luxury resort located in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific which offers a combination of casinos (with more than 200 gaming tables and over 350 slot machines), accommodations and more than 20 dining and entertainment facilities. The 14-story hotel building has more than 340 hotel suites, including 15 deluxe villas, and a total area of 140,000 square meters.
During the earliest construction phases of the project, Imperial Pacific management identified a need for a comprehensive in-building wireless system to support both cellular and public safety traffic in every guest room, service area and public area.
The main challenges of the project were to provide commercial cellular coverage for two operators with the capability to handle more in the future, to deliver public safety wireless coverage for first responders and the ability to support new frequencies over time with minimal added cost and disruption.
Following a request for proposals, the project management committee chose Zinwave’s UNItivity system. This in-building wireless system has a wideband architecture that natively supports frequencies ranging from 150 MHz to 2700 MHz without the need for hardware upgrades as new frequencies come online
The system currently supports three wireless services: two public cellular services provided by Docomo Pacific and IT&E (using 700 MHz LTE, 850 MHz UMTS, 1900 MHz LTE, and 2100 MHz UMTS frequencies), and an in-house public safety service using the 800 MHz frequency.
To deliver these frequencies, Zinwave deployed five primary hubs, 36 secondary hubs and 283 remote units.
Deployment proceeded during the final construction stages of the project and took just a few weeks to complete. The system was installed, commissioned and ready to go in time for the resort’s opening last year.
“We were impressed with the UNItivity system’s ease of installation. It has such a simple architecture and leverages fiber we had pre-installed in the building, so it was just a matter of hooking up the Hubs and deploying the Remote Units,” said Pedro Vong, CEO of DC Systems Digital Communications, the system integrator of the project.