Fiber to the Slot Machine: Fiber Backs Vegas’ Newest High-Tech Casino Resort
By Jessica Janis
Published: February 9, 2023
In a city defined by its eye-popping flair, it takes an especially bold effort to stand out from the pack. Since opening in 2021, Resorts World Las Vegas has done just that: as the first new resort property to join the Las Vegas Strip in over a decade, the facility features an array of groundbreaking technologies that take hospitality, gaming, and entertainment to a whole new level—and it’s all made possible by an extensive fiber optic infrastructure.
Early in the design process, Corning sought to engineer a fiber network that would equip the cutting-edge property with all the connectivity it would need to dazzle guests now and well into the future. This includes powering digital transactions within the 117,000-square-foot casino and 70,000-square-foot retail center, connecting the 40-plus food and beverage outlets, and delivering fiber to the room (FTTR) connectivity for the 3,500-key tri-branded Hilton hotel towers.
High expectations
Resorts World set out from the very beginning to create an experience to exceed the sky-high expectations of Vegas visitors—with a particular emphasis on employees and hotel guests. This meant an incredibly robust network with massive bandwidth to deliver an enhanced guest experience with integrated technology. With a traditional category cable-based system, this would have required hundreds of rooms filled with networking and telecommunications equipment, a serious drawback for a venue looking to maximize the amount of revenue-generating floor space. Worse yet, copper-wired infrastructure would have to be upgraded down the line to accommodate any needed system expansion.
High bandwidth was key for a number of reasons. In addition to the capability of guests to use five-plus connected devices per room, the network infrastructure also needed to support connectivity across the gaming floors to enable new technologies like cashless wagering at slots and table games. It would also need to carry video to a plethora of screens across the complex, including the 100,000-square-foot LED screen spanning much of the surface of the tower’s west wing. And, of course, it needed to be capable of handling any unknown requirements the future might bring.
Fiber to the edge
To realize the ambitious goals of today and to be ready for tomorrow’s needs, Resorts World Las Vegas decided to install a fiber optic-based infrastructure using Corning® Everon™ Network Solutions. This enabled a much more streamlined cabling design that slashed the number of required telecom rooms from the hundreds that were planned to just 24 for the entire 88-acre property—while also providing far more bandwidth headroom in the process.
The facility utilizes a Software Defined Local Area Network (SD-LAN) with a fiber to the room (FTTR) and remote DC-power architecture. ActiFi® Composite Cable is one (1) flexible cable bundled with optical fiber and copper conductor, allowing power and connectivity to be carried long distances to the edges of the network. In the rooms, short jumper cables extend to each application or endpoint, such as the Wi-Fi access point, IPTV, and IP phone.
The complex features enough fiber infrastructure to handle a variety of future expansions, including next-generation cellular enhancement to unlock cutting-edge functionality and speeds, as well as the advent of Wi-Fi 7, which would otherwise require four CAT 6A cables per wireless access point.
The long-term savings over traditional networking are numerous. Beyond avoiding inevitable “rip-and-replace” future upgrades, the optical fiber solution requires far less equipment to install, operate, and maintain—translating to reduced capital and operational costs on installation and maintenance, and vastly lower energy bills to cool the equipment. Further, the additional space can be leveraged for revenue generation in the form of more hotel rooms or suites.
Finally, the drastic reduction in cabling material has the added benefit of lowering Resorts World’s carbon footprint. Add in the savings on air conditioning equipment that would be necessary for the hundreds of additional telecommunications rooms, and the fiber optic installation comes out light years ahead in environmental friendliness.
Planning for the future
For massive facilities like Resorts World Las Vegas, a fiber to the edge solution is a no-brainer for economically handling the intensive bandwidth requirements of today and those that will arise in the future. But other more modest-sized hospitality and entertainment venues can also realize similar cost benefits, especially over the long term. And for both, there’s a tremendous upside in sustainability.
