iBAHN, provider of digital converged services for hoteliers, announced a major expansion to its EMEA network. The upgrade is designed to further strengthen iBAHN's proprietary worldwide network, which is already the most technically advanced available to the hospitality industry.

The network developments focus on iBAHN's Point of Presence (POPs) in Frankfurt and London. iBAHN has moved its London POP to a higher standard facility that allows all major data circuits entering the POP to be expanded, in answer to the continued demand for bandwidth, geographical expansion and iBAHN's advanced converged services.

Each POP will be connected to iBAHN's major telecommunications partners' networks, offering full resilience against failures and allowing hoteliers to present an unrivalled quality of service to their customers.

iBAHN's continued investment in its network reflects the explosion in demand for online content, which has seen the amount of data that it handles increase five times over the last three years. This equates to 1.9 petabytes of data (nearly 2000 terabytes) or the equivalent of a book with more than 400 billion pages of data.

The data upsurge has been caused by the continued evolution of bandwidth-heavy applications such as iPods, VOIP, movies and online TV channels, which will be further exploited as more High Definition content is made available. These services are all essential to the majority of hotel guests, but place huge pressures on hotelier's networks.

Neil Williams, director of EMEA Operations at iBAHN, comments: "The completion of iBAHN's network expansion marks the end of nine months of work. The new network design offers much greater level of resilience and flexibility, and opens up an unrivalled level of capacity for our customers. At iBAHN, we are leading the industry in digital convergence and our network strength is the backbone to every service that we offer."

Upgrades to the network will also allow new converged services to be developed and launched such as building and property management, environmental control integration and security systems.

Currently, more than 40 iBAHN installed hotels offer between 10 and 100mb data lines, and as a result of the network expansion iBAHN will be able to offer hoteliers a wide range of cost, capacity and reliability benefits through its service offering. These include: Direct to Internet, Tunnelled On-net, IP-VPN over MPLS and Ethernet, and multiple delivery technologies such as ADSL, SDSL, E1 and fibre.