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Being Wired isn't What We Think
The Travel Technologist · March 23, 2000

During the good old days of the 20th century, John Patrick remembers having to unscrew the wall plates in his hotel room to make a modem connection. On several occasions, he even dismantled the telephone and used alligator clips to get online.

It may be a new century now, but the good old days are still very much here. Although many properties now offer dedicated phone jacks that let you hook up to a modem without a toolkit, the progress has been slower than a 9600 bps connection on a 486 processor PC. "Virtually all hotels are still narrowband," Patrick complains.

Patrick isn't just another business traveler spinning his wheels about the persistent bandwidth problem. He's the vice president of Internet technology at IBM and a very frequent traveler who, like other road warriors, is chagrined by the lack of reliable connections at hotels.

"Broadband is here now and I am sure hotels will soon be adding it," he predicts. "Technology is available to enable them to offer a local area network throughout the hotel by sharing the existing telephone wiring." He foresees that soon, many hotels will install a server in the basement that will offer not only the high-speed connectivity but also a local Web site with restaurant menus, reservation forms for meals or spa treatments, and local maps of the area.

"The day is close when we won't have to listen to the whir and hiss of modems anymore," he adds.

Not close enough, to hear the analysts talk about it. "The percentage of hotels that offer broadband Internet access is small. Very small," says Bobby Bowers, a lodging expert at Smith Travel Research in Hendersonville, Tenn. "At the moment, the hotels that offer this kind of access are in major markets, and they are upscale business travel hotels. Without a doubt, that will change, but it may take a while - up to five years - before it catches on."

Do we have that long? I doubt it. It isn't so much our fault as it is the programmers who script the bloated applications - the very same ones that allow us to create presentations that use graphics, animation and video clips, which require vast amounts of storage space. It is these files, impractical to transmit over copper wires, which demand a faster connection. Within months, a quick connection won't be a luxury. It will be a necessity.

Yet many hotel managers remain clueless at best, intentionally ignorant at worst. An informal survey of the major hotel chains reveals that their definition of "wired" is rarely the same as ours. And when it is, there's often a disconnect about how much the services should cost. At some of the biggest properties that cater to the most frequent travelers, an extra dataport (which is usually nothing more than a second phone line) is considered an amenity. Want something faster? Then you have to amble down to the business center with all of your gear in tow, pay an exorbitant hourly fee, and spend a few minutes trying to configure your laptop to the network.

In its last membership survey, 43 percent of the American Hotel & Motel Association's constituents claimed to be "wired," but that classification included everything from offering in-room fax machines to second phone lines. In the survey before that, the association didn't even bother asking about connectivity.

Generally speaking, when frequent travelers say "wired," they're referring to something approximating a T-1 line, which runs at about 1.5 megabits per second, or 100 times faster than the fastest conventional modem connection.

"Demand for high-speed connectivity is very light from the hotels themselves," agrees Mark Haley, director of customer relationship management for hsupply.com, a business-to-business hotel technology services company based in Atlanta. "That's because the 'take' rates - or the rate at which guests use these services - is in the single digits. Usage only goes up when people don't pay for it."

The result is that hotels, which don't see that there'll be much profit in installing the high-speed lines, try to put the best spin on their lack of connections. Or they sugarcoat the charges that travelers will get socked with. For example:

- The Doubletree hotel chain's new Club Hotels - which claim to be "revolutionizing business travel" can't seem to offer more than a dataport with two phones and a voice-mail system in its rooms. In all fairness to the Doubletree (which happens to be one of my personal favorites because of the delicious chocolate-chip cookies it serves) I should mention that its new Club Rooms, which are glorified business centers, really do go a long way toward helping the business traveler. But great cookies and well-equipped centers don't make the data move any faster.

- One of the earliest innovators in connectivity, Hilton Hotels, is committed to high-speed access. But a recent deal to wire some of its rooms with CAIS Internet comes at a price. In order to use its new OverVoice "premiere high speed Internet voice/data technology" that lets guests surf the Internet at up to 10 Mbps, you'll get charged at a rate that "may be adjusted based on overall usage of the service," but usually doesn't exceed $10 a day. That almost sounds like a threat. But Hilton's got the right idea: As far back as 1996, with the introduction of its Telesuite videoconferencing network, the chain was heading in the wired direction.

- Marriott recently began installing high-speed Internet hook-ups in many of its guestrooms, meeting rooms and business centers. Its network is up to 50 times faster than conventional data ports and lets guest to access the Internet and use the telephone at the same time. Thanks to a new "plug and play" system, visitors will be able to connect to the network using an Ethernet or USB cable. Cost: A day of Internet access will set you back $9.95.

- Even the high-end hotels that you'd assume come with the latest and greatest tech amenities would disappoint. Luxury chains like the Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton, while offering every other amenity a frequent traveler could imagine, come with "in-room fax" and "multi-line phones with 'hold' buttons and fax and computer modem capabilities". Ditto at the Loews Hotels: Its "two-line phones" come with only one noticeable benefit - they're "direct dial."

We've certainly come a long way from the days when we had to rig our portables to acoustic couplers in order to get online. But today, travelers want more than just a convenient RJ-11 jack. They need high-speed access, but they usually don't want to pay extra for it. And it's obvious that hotels would gladly offer the service, if only the travelers would shell out a few extra bucks.

Is there a middle ground? I think there can be, but it might take a while to find it.

The two parties could sure use a little help from the folks who started this whole bandwidth crisis in the first place, the programmers and software publishers that don't seem to know the difference between a kilobyte and a terabyte. By curbing their applications' appetite for memory, they might at least arrest this problem, giving us a temporary reprieve from this access dilemma.

What do you think? Would you pay more for a quicker connection? If so, how much? Or do you think hotels should factor free high-speed Internet connections into the cost of their rooms, and offer it as a "free" amenity? And whose fault is this in the first place?

E-mail me with your opinions at chris@elliott.org and I'll include them in a future column. As always, please include your full name, city of residence and what you do for a living.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.