Got guests plugging in more devices? Give them bandwidth!

As the number of mobile devices and their use increase, hoteliers should look toward the future instead of investing in expensive bandwidth solutions that will be obsolete in a matter of years.

“When the recession started, people were focused on one device,” said John Marshall, founder and CEO of Airwatch. “Now each room has multiple mobile devices hogging bandwidth. It is all about bandwidth management now, and not necessarily improving the infrastructure with capital expenditures.”

Marshall said that after guests began staying at hotels again during the tail end of the economic downturn, hoteliers faced a technology problem they had not anticipated.

“In 2010, with occupancy down and then with the economy starting to bounce back, we started to get a lot of people coming back to hotels,” he said. “But over that year and a half downturn, the one thing that accelerated was the adoption of mobile devices—bandwidth-hogging devices, not just smartphones but iPads and tablets.”

The outpacing of consumer technology compared to hotel technology upgrades has created a different set of guest expectations than even a few years ago.

Plan ahead

“New properties are going to converge voice, data and video networks,” said Kris Singleton, CIO of Kimpton Hotels. “The question is how do you manage the quality of service? The good thing is that the cost of that circuit is getting cheaper and cheaper, so bigger and bigger pipes are not at the extravagant cost you had even two years ago.”

Now that many hotels boast technology that is more dated than what a traveler has at home, a different set of goals should govern a hotelier’s thinking on bandwidth.

“When people used to go to a hotel, they expected part of the experience was to enjoy an ambience and total package that you could not enjoy at home, that was better than what you had at home,” Marshall said. “The challenge now is how do hotels catch up around the IT experience, as well as that mobility experience, so they’re not lagging behind what consumers are expecting and not lagging behind what customers are getting from other verticals like mobile experience.”

Marshall said there are more affordable options available for hoteliers to increase guest satisfaction than upgrading a property’s information infrastructure.

“The majority of spend related to Internet technology was about increasing bandwidth, shaping bandwidth management, and if there were capital purchases they were around devices that allow hotels to aggregate multiple DSL or t1 lines,” Marshall said. “Now it is all about increasing bandwidth with minor capital investment, figuring out what’s going to be the next thing coming up.”

Marshall cited Red Roof Inn’s installing T-Mobile HotSpot Wireless Broadband service in every property as an example of a particularly forward-thinking IT investment.

Put it on the cloud

By moving back of the house computer systems to off-property locations, hoteliers can save on bandwidth and increase their flexibility.

“Cloud computing is becoming a much broader focus for most companies,” said Mike Miller, CTO of EZYield. “If you look at overall cost, the cloud enables us to better deliver our services globally. In terms of servicing the Asia-Pacific market, we can do it better and more cost effective. This allows us to translate that directly into our pricing model. Our focus is to add value and cloud computing allows us to do that in a very cost-effective manner.

Load balancing controls bandwidth

Load balancing allows hoteliers to route multiple incoming sources of bandwidth together and distribute it throughout the hotel as one source. Often, hotels choose to monitor and manage the bandwidth traffic distribution, capping certain sources and withholding space for critical users.

A load balancer allows all the multiple sources to be converged and distributed to back-of-house servers, meeting space and guestrooms.

Advanced load balancers allow bandwidth to be capped, preventing a single guest from monopolizing all of a hotel’s bandwidth, slowing surfing speeds for others.

Monitoring which guest or which area of the hotel doesn’t require a full-time staffer. In fact, most load balancers can be pre-programmed and set to determine critical or non-critical usage