Whitbread, owner of Premier Inn, operates the UK’s largest hotel network: 850 hotels, 86,000+ rooms and over 35 million guest stays every year. Every site depends on intruder detection, alarm signalling and CCTV systems where downtime must be avoided. When the PSTN switch-off placed the entire estate’s analogue infrastructure on a countdown to obsolescence, Whitbread needed a transformation programme that could run across hundreds of live, guest-facing environments without any downtime.
Legacy infrastructure was putting life safety at risk
Alarm signalling and CCTV monitoring across the estate all ran on analogue telephone lines that would soon cease to operate. Existing connections were already becoming less reliable – introducing the risk of communication failures before the national switch-off deadline even arrived. Analogue CCTV also limited remote access and incident verification, slowing the speed at which security teams could assess events and respond.
Migrating a single building is a manageable project. Replacing critical life safety infrastructure across 850+ live, occupied hotels – without disrupting operations or leaving any site unprotected – required a different order of planning, coordination and expertise.
A national rollout – across live hotels, without disruption
CSL Group was brought in to provide the connectivity layer underpinning the entire programme. SECOM, appointed as the installer, managed the on-site engineering works, equipment replacement and commissioning across every hotel. The programme was built around one non-negotiable principle: every hotel must remain fully protected throughout the migration.
CSL delivered resilient, dual-path 4G connectivity at every location – meaning if one network path became unavailable, the secondary connection assumed communications automatically, with no manual intervention and no gap in cover. Rather than applying resilience selectively, dual-path became the standard design across the entire estate, giving every site the same level of protection regardless of location or existing infrastructure.
CCTV was modernised in parallel – analogue systems replaced with digital, significantly improving remote access and the speed of incident verification for Whitbread’s security teams.
The result: a resilient, future-ready estate with no gaps in cover
Whitbread’s security infrastructure is now fully digital, resilient and future-proofed. Alarm signals transmit over secure 4G connections directly to the monitoring centre. Security teams can access live CCTV remotely, enabling faster verification without requiring personnel to attend site. And because the architecture has been deployed consistently across the estate, every one of Whitbread’s hotels operates to the same security standard – a resilient national platform, not a patchwork of site-specific solutions.
“SECOM has been our trusted security partner for over 25 years. This project is a great example of how they work collaboratively and innovatively to deliver a complex project with minimal impact on our operational hotel teams, ensuring no loss of critical security systems or cover.”
John Brind, Director of Safety & Security, Whitbread Plc
“The PSTN switch-off is a pivotal moment for organisations that rely on critical life safety systems. By taking a proactive approach, Whitbread has not only safeguarded its operations but created a future-ready security platform capable of supporting the next generation of digital technologies. For a programme of this scale and complexity, we needed a connectivity partner we could rely on completely – CSL’s expertise in critical environments and their dual-path architecture gave us the foundation to deliver without compromise.”
Dan Wilkinson, Technical Director, SECOM Plc
Managing a multi-site estate where failure isn’t an option?
If you’re running connectivity across multiple sites – whether that’s 5, 500 or 5,000 – the infrastructure holding your safety systems together needs to be built around your environment, not bolted on to it. Talk to us about how we’d approach yours.
