Technology: A Guide to Lodging Internet Connectivity / HMM / Russell Shaw / June 1998

Hotel Online Special Report

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Technology: A Guide to Lodging Internet Connectivity

By Russell Shaw H&MM Contributing Editor

Standard phone service

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines (ASDL)

Upon arriving at their guestrooms, many of today's business travelers will plug their laptop computers into the port on the side of their telephone and dial up the Internet or their personal corporate network connection at 33,600 kilobits per second.

This process may be enough to satisfy your guest's telecommunications needs now- but what about in a year or two? Will this method of Internet access be rendered obsolete by new technologies and guest conveniences?
On-line access for guests consists of two separate issues-transmission and presentation. Here are some questions to consider.

Transmission:

How will on-line access be delivered to the room?

At what speed will the actual connection be made?

What type of delivery mechanism will be used to route the guest to the Internet or company local-area network?

What interface will be required on your hotel telephone network or power plant, and how much will it cost to install and maintain?

Presentation:

Through what type of appliance will be your guest obtain on-line access?

Will access be transmitted via a standard phone line, wireless connection or the guestroom television equipped with a set-top converter box?

These sound like two separate issues, but they're not. The various presentation solutions often depend upon the right transmission solutions, and vice-versa. Because you can't provide Internet access until you decide how you are going to tap into this global network, let's take a look at transmission methods. There are seven basic access options that are,or soon will be, available to you. They are:

Standard phone service;

Integrated Services Digital Network;

Cable modems;

Satellite dishes;

Wireless connection;

T-1 lines;

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines.

Basic connectivity options:

Standard phone service - Also called POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service), this is probably what you're providing now: a dual-port telephone where guests plug in their laptop and go through the hotel PBX to reach the outside world.	How Your Guests Will Use It: They already are, usually by plugging their laptop (or one that you rent to them) into an RJ-11 port on the side of the phone in their room. It also can work with Internet set-top devices, such as WebTV.
	Cost: Whatever your local exchange carrier and your PBX vendor currently charges.
	Pros: Outside of periodic maintenance and minor upgrades, the system already is installed and is a very minor capital expenditure line.
	Cons: Because standard phone lines are designed for voice and not digital data, the Internet access you furnish will be limited to slightly less than 56,000 kilobits a second-a slow speed in the next year or two. It's also difficult to program some laptop telecommunications software with phone credit - card numbers or passwords necessary to obtain access to a company's LAN.

ISDN - Combines either two or three separate connections into one simultaneous hookup where data and voice can both be sent.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Via a phone line in their room equipped with an ISDN modem. May require a separate phone or a direct line.
	Cost: Several hundred dollars for initial hook-up and equipment, plus a monthly surcharge of around $50 per line.
	Pros: Faster than current hook-ups, ISDN is ideal to deliver voice and data simultaneously.
	Cons: ISDN probably will be incompatible with the hotel PBX and require a separate, direct line for each connection. This presents usage monitoring, cost - control and security issues.

Cable Modems - These fast modems use the hotel's cable TV connection to send and receive data. Because the bandwidth already required for cable is extensive, the pipe is thick and can carry more data at a faster rate than most other on-line access options.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Through the room's cable TV connection hooked up to a prewired computer supplied by you and installed in the room, or to a guest's laptop equipped with a cable-modem interface card.
	Cost: Because the technology is only now being tested, a single cost model hasn't yet emerged. If the most common residential plan being tested by local cable companies is adopted for commercial use, expect to pay around $40 per month per connection, plus a one-time per-room rewiring fee of about $100. To drive usage, many cable companies are giving the modems away for free, with the expectation this will drive new sign-ups to the point that it will make money for them.
	Pros: Blazing speed, more than 10 megabits a second in some cases. Because hotels are probably doing business with cable companies, they may receive a substantial price break based on volume.
	Cons: Cable modems are another outside-the-PBX solution, which costs extra. How quickly will hotels' cap-ex and monthly bills to their cable provider be covered by additional roomnights from guests attracted by cable modem availability? With the technology still somewhat unproven and some cable companies not enjoying stellar reputations, many guests may be reluctant to try this. Also, the network is structured in such a way that multiple access attempts from several guests at once will slow down system performance.

Satellite dishes - If you've got a place on your property to put a 21-inch dish and face it south, you're already partially there. The largest satellite-based Internet access provider is DirecTV and its DirecPC service.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Most commonly from the dish to the television set, equipped with a remote control or keyboard.
	Cost: A DirecPC dish costs around $500. The company's rates range from around 60 cents per megabyte downloaded at night to less than $140 a month for unlimited daytime access.
	Pros: If your property is in a rural area underserved by local Internet service providers, this can be very cost-effective. Performance of about 400 kilobits per second is more than 10 times the most-common Internet access speed used today.
	Cons: Currently, satellite dish Internet access is one-way only. If guests want to browse Web sites, fine; if they want to send data through large documents or even a short e-mail note, they need to do so through the standard phone line already in the room. The dish and phone connections can work together, but it may not be easy to get the two systems to talk to each other.

Wireless Internet - Internet e-mail messages and short bits of text sent without the need for a wired phone connection.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Via their own Internet-ready appliance, such as a display-capable cell phone, pager or dedicated device. Hotels may consider obtaining some of these devices to rent to guests.
	Costs: Guests generally will pay $300 to $500 for these utilities. If you've got centralized purchasing power, you probably can obtain several at a lower price and make your money back on daily rental fees.
	Pros: Handy and easy to use, these are amenities that when rented to guests, tend to solidify a hotel's reputation as a forward-looking, guest-solutions provider. Since they operate outside your current phone system, no fancy PBX retrofitting is required.
	Cons: Small screen only allows short bits of data retrieval. You can't very well view a company intranet site or download a PowerPoint demonstration on it.

T1 lines - These are digital phone lines that can deliver data over the Internet or private networks at up to 1,544,000 megabits per second, or more than 50 times the speed of today's 28,800 megabits per second modems.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Via in-room or their own machines, which will be plugged into the T1 connection running from a central access point in your property to each room you decide to equip for the technology.
	Cost: One-time installation can cost more than $5,000, mostly for routers that process data traffic to and from your guestrooms according to T1 specifications. You'll probably need only one T1 line per property; these average around $1,500 a month. It also will cost more than $100 per room to rewire for T1.
	Pros: T1 lines are dedicated, "always on" Internet connections, which means that your guests won't have to dial-in first. Think of it as plug-in-and-play.
	Cons: If you spend $25,000 up-front to set up your 200-room hotel for T1, how long will it take you to recoup the cost via additional roomnights you wouldn't have otherwise booked?

ADSL - A digital Internet access technology that runs on existing copper telephone wires. ADSL will be marketed by regional phone companies, perhaps as early as this fall.	How Your Guests Will Use It: Through computers with ADSL modems hooked up to specially configured phone lines, with calls processed by compatible ADSL equipment at the other end-such as an Internet Service Provider or corporate network access point.
	Cost: Because it still is somewhat unproven, costs can be in the thousands for start-up, plus several hundred a month per line.
	Pros: At T1-like speeds of around 1.5 megabits per second for downloads, it's one of the fastest technologies around.
	Cons: Still somewhat unproven technology, which differs by local phone company. Requires a special ADSL modem at each end, which might pose a problem for guests trying to access a corporate network not so equipped. Because of this, the hotel's return on investment might depend on how quickly corporate America buys into the concept and installs enough ADSL modems on LANs accessed by your guest base. There are comparatively slow upload speeds of around 64,000 kilobits a second.

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Contact: Hotel & Motel Management website: http://www.hmmonline.com Jeff Higley, Managing Editor 440-891-2654 email: jhigley@advanstar.com

Also see:	New Book Helps Hoteliers Make Sense of the Internet
	Pinehurst Resort Country Club to begin trials of EtherLoop, a high-speed Internet access solution
	Internet Expectations Exceed Current Use