More on Marriott

Network World has a story about the “horror” Marriott’s IT crew went through with the advent of demand for bandwidth inside hotels.

The story is very well positioned and contains many points that were brought up to me in a recent chat with a Marriott executive.

What this also tells me is that until recently hotel leadership in general seemed to be in the dark about what the “road warrior’s needs” were or are. Since 2000 or so I have been using in room broadband and along the way had many a chat with hotel IT executives about the lack of planned capacity.

Back in 2000 the average number of users per room day was six to eight people. That meant a single T1 or a very fast DSL line was enough most of the time for users, and the biggest issue facing us was if you could use your own SMTP server to SEND email via a mail client, or if you had to change settings, neither of which was trivial or standardized.

Within a year or so, six users per night turned into six percent of the hotels guests seemed to become the average take rate. That grew in markets like Silicon Valley, SF and NY over the next year or so. Now I’m told the take rate is between 30 and 40 percent on average by the leading hotel chains, but that’s misleading as hotels in SF, Silicon Valley, San Diego, New York and L.A. likely attract a far higher level of “need to really be connected” type people than hotels in Des Moines, Syracuse and Bangor. While some do, the concentration of many, many in one hotel on the same day is less likely. At some properties in the hotbed markets I would guess that the real take rate is likely over 50 percent, especially during conferences and key industry events or trade shows.

Getting current. If the past issue was SMTP server settings, the new issue in my view is “rush hour” traffic on the networks at hotels. For those of us who work in our rooms like an office on the road, we can notice the fluctuations in bandwidth and availability. If you’re at a conference and the sessions break for the day, notice how your bandwidth transport slows when everyone logs on. Since there isn’t an HOV lane on the hotel’s network, there’s no way to avoid it, but smarter hotel chains are rapidly moving to the concept of bandwidth on demand. That’s great news for the folks at companies like Wayport who have a proven model for that which works. They also have a great support folks and product managers who are very much in touch with what the hotels need and the hotel want.

Bottom line. Hotels are no longer looking at broadband in rooms as simply an amenity. Many chains are seeing that they have to order as much pipe, and it has to be quality pipe too, the same way they approach the kind of food they are serving to their guests in the better grade restaurants that are starting to show up more and more in the hotels across the globe.