News

It looks like some Hilton brands are going to begin providing faster Wi-Fi for guests—but there’s a cost to it.

USA Today is reporting:

The new Wi-Fi tier will become an option at Hilton’s limited service and extended stay brands: Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Homewood Suites and Home 2 Suites.

Josh Weiss, vice president of brand and guest technology for Hilton, says the hotels will start offering the faster Wi-Fi in the next two months and roll it out to all hotels in those brands throughout this year.

The price will vary depending on the location, but guests will typically be charged $3.95. They will be able to use it on up to three devices.

Weiss says guests have indicated in surveys that they would be willing to pay for upgraded bandwidth.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for Hilton. Our experience has shown that guests are willing to pay for a premium service, and we love the $3.95 price point for three devices. It makes cost recovery very possible and likely won’t upset guests.

Liveport provides tiered guest Internet access in the Liveport Plus package.

Read the full USA Today story here.

We’ve written before about how the incredible growth of iPads and iPhones is putting tremendous pressure on hotel wifi networks. Now, in a recent report from Gartner, network providers are being warned that they may need 300% more access points in their network just to meet iPad demand and match the performance of laptops on the same network.

It’s a daunting prospect, and one that is leaving many hotels with no option but to upgrade and significantly change the deployment of their wireless network.

The primary reason old networks aren’t working well with new technology such as the iPad and other mobile devices is transmit power. The Internet relies on two-way communication. No matter how powerful a hotel’s access points are, the network is only as strong as the signal coming from its weakest device: in this case, the iPad. A device simply won’t function online If it can receive data but can’t communicate back to the network. And here lies the problem.

Gartner notes that the iPad’s transmit power of 10 mW does not compare with the 30 mW to 50 mW of a typical laptop. When your network has been designed with the laptop in mind–and not the iPad–newer devices simply won’t have the performance or range guests expect.

“While the iPad may connect, performance will fall off much more quickly than laptops as the user moves away from the access point, and, depending on the [wireless] design parameters, may find itself in a coverage hole at the edge of the coverage area where other devices are able to operate,” said the report.

So, what’s the solution? Garnet notes, that this “has little to do with the transmit power of the access point, since even vendor access point default values (30 mW to 100 mW) will be higher than the 10 mW device transmit power of the iPad.” In other words, increasing the power of existing access points won’t work. The answer is simply to add more access points–about three times more–or plan the network more effectively.

It’s no coincidence that this has been Liveport’s approach since inception. With Liveport’s mesh technology, we typically triple or quadruple the number of access points when upgrading a property–typically without adding any new cables. These access points are located close enough for guests to connect flawlessly, no matter how weak their device is, while simultaneously providing a high-speed backbone to the web.

It appears the days of few, high-powered access points are coming to an end in the age of the iPad. If you’d like to read the full report, click here.

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.