You may evaluate hotel rooms based on the number of square feet,
the comfort of the mattress or the size of the television screen.
But increasingly people are sizing up hotel rooms based on the
ability to get high-speed Internet connectivity.
The days of crawling behind the bed to find the phone jack and
hoping you have enough wire to reach the power supply are coming to
an end.
Things have improved in most of the best hotels where at the
very least you're likely to find a phone with a dataport and a
nearby power supply. In the better hotels, everything you need
often is built into the desk lamp.
But as the world rushes toward broadband, business travelers are
beginning to demand ever faster Internet access when they're on the
road.
A survey by Cahners In-Stat, a high-tech market research company
owned by our parent firm, says 48% of the hotels that replied to
the researchers are forging ahead to speed up connectivity within
the next 12 months.
These hotels want to differentiate themselves from their
competitors and they also see the introduction of broadband as a
revenue generator. Under consideration is a wide range of pricing
plans, from charging by the minute or the night to a flat rate for
the entire hotel stay.
The survey's respondents also said they plan to deploy broadband
in their conference rooms to enhance Internet access during
business meetings.
The service providers getting into the hotel broadband game are
going after the larger chains first so that they can win contracts
to install the connectivity in hundreds of properties at once.
The technology that will drive the faster access, according to
Cahners In-Stat, is called Mini-POPs or mini points of presence.
They're described as smaller-scale versions of the aggregation
devices that sit in a telecom provider's central office. A new
class of service providers is coming onto the scene to market the
technology to hotel owners and operators.
Cahners In-Stat analyst Amy Helland sees the installation of
broadband as a new way for hotels to compete. She says that
broadband access "will be a terrific benefit to the haves and an
enormous detriment to the have nots."
So get ready to request a non-smoking room with a king-size bed
and broadband.