Cox Business announced this morning it will launch its Hospitality WiFi service across its footprint later this year.

Cox has been offerings its business-grade Wi-Fi in Las Vegas hotels and casinos for several years, as well as in other portions of its footprint.

“Hospitality WiFi is a huge benefit for our customers,” said Cox Communications executive vice president and CTO Kevin Hart earlier this month at The Cable Show. “We have that in hospitalities primarily in Vegas, but in other areas as well and we also have the metro Wi-Fi.  Both of those are leveraging some of our new backoffice Wi-Fi core that we’re standing up to allow additional scale and rapid growth from that point.”

Like Comcast, Hart said Cox’s goal was to provision its metro and business Wi-Fi services through one backoffice system.

“That’s definitely where we’re headed and we have a good start,” Hart said. “We have a good core stood up from a backoffice standpoint with the trials in metro and we’re adding in the hospitably backoffice in a phased sequence.”

On the vendor front, Cox Business is using Cisco’s “service provider Wi-Fi solution” to build out the Hospitality WiFi network. The Cox Hospitality WiFi service includes continuous proactive monitoring of the Cisco platform to help ensure that end users have a good user experience.

“A seamless wireless Internet experience is one of the most critical elements of a positive hotel stay,” said Jeff Adelmann, vice president of product development and management for Cox Business.  “We ensure a premium network experience so our hospitality customers can expect repeat business and positive reviews. That’s what they count on us for, and that’s what we deliver.

“We ensure ubiquitous coverage throughout the properties we work with, and guests can troubleshoot directly with us 24/7, so hotel staff can focus on running the hotel, not IT.”  

Cox Business said it works with each hospitality customer to feature their brand on the customer splash page and will provide customized in-room materials to aid as guests login to the network. 

“It’s truly an end-to-end managed solution designed for each unique hospitality brand we serve,” said Adelmann.

Cox Business currently has 2,000 hospitality customers and offers its triple play services to more than 250,000 guest rooms across its footprint.

The hospitality sector is a growing vertical for service providers. Yesterday Dish Network Dish announced the launch of its Smartbox platform, which can provision HD and SD channels in every hotel room through one unit.  

Over the past two years, Time Warner Cable Business Class has been provisioning hospitality services to hotels in New York and other areas, and  rolled out a new HD platform for the hospitality sector in March.  

Earlier this year, Comcast Business packaged up its Ethernet, Internet, video and voice services into a new product suite that was designed specifically for hotels and motels.