Internet connectivity at hotels is often taken for granted - until it crashes or simply grinds to a halt. Event organizers, hotels and conference centers are rushing to keep up, as travelers move away from email and simple web access, to downloading movies or firing up Ye Olde SlingBox to watch the local programming.
Some hotels have lost business while others have gained it simply on the reliability and amount of bandwidth they have available. Streaming media and videoconferencing have proven to be game changers, but the bandwidth needed for hotel administration has also increased awareness and bigger pipe-buying. Most business hotels are now into multiple T1s at the very least, with T3s and/or burstable fiber making their way into deployments as well.
Really slick hotels have implemented high-end network technology allowing partitioning and QoS to guarantee bandwidth. Bandwidth can be allocated to meeting rooms during the day to insure that events get the access they need.
For more:
- NY Times concisely defines the problem of hotel bandwidth. Article.
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