Liveport featured in Canadian Lodging News

When the Canadian Lodging News ran a special feature this month on in-room technology, they featured Liveport for the “wireless connectivity” section. Take a look:

Wireless connectivity

Wireless Internet is at the top of the list of guest preferences these days.

In J.D. Power and Associates’ 2010 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study, 77 per cent of guests indicate the in-room Internet connection they use is Wi-Fi, compared with just 55 per cent in 2007.

Some of the traditional problems with wireless Internet are spotty availability, particularly in older hotels with concrete walls and floors, guests “hogging” the bandwidth by downloading movies and other large files, and installation, which can be complicated, time consuming and disruptive to guests.

Kelowna, BC-based Liveport has a novel approach to all three of these problems.  It uses many tiny encased nodes to blanket the hotel, rather than a few high-powered devices.

“This way, you get perfect signals in every room,” says Liveport’s Ryan Detwiller. And if one node goes down, the others automatically reconfigure so that guests notice no difference in coverage.”

These nodes can be placed in unobtrusive places throughout the guest room, for example behind the television or the fridge. They don’t have to be put in the roof, there’s no drilling and no wires, and thus no interruptions to guests.

“We can install a whole property in a few hours,” Detwiller says.

They also have Dashboard, their live web-based software, which allows hoteliers to monitor their networks, observe traffic, manage bandwidth hogs and set up pay for use.

In addition, the price is easy to calculate at $2 per room per month.

For the full article at Canadian Lodging News, click here.