Got Wi-Fi Joejava Wireless

If the office is the first place of work, then home is the second. Is there a third? Yes, and it’s all those places in between the office and home where business people are to be found. The Internet’s killer application is Email, and business people want access to it in as many places as possible.

The airport lounge is one such third-place location – the demographic is perfect and the clientele are truly captive. They are typically not achieving anything for their employers during their lengthy wait to board, so providing these road warriors with speedy wireless connectivity enables them to remain productive throughout more of the business day.

Since the airport model is already well covered by the major WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) players, the next area of focus is the hospitality and convention center sectors.

Business travelers contribute almost 50% of the hospitality industry’s annual revenue, and their requirements are simple and consistent – quiet rooms, free airport shuttles, complimentary breakfasts and high-speed Internet. Down the list of priorities goes the roof-top swimming pool and dancing water fountains.

Business travelers are typically tired, harassed, homesick and falling behind on both corporate and personal Email. An airport hotel is the perfect place to take a shower, eat an expensed dinner and to sit in the comfort of one’s hotel room and proceed to wade through that mounting pile of Emails that never seem to stop arriving.

Gone are the days when the customer was content with plugging their modem cable into the RJ-11 phone jack on the desk’s table lamp. Many people no longer have dial-up accounts, and those already overloaded phone switches can’t typically pass data above 28,800 Kbps. This is no longer simply a desire, but is now a clear need for broadband on the part of business travelers.

With some 12,000 of the total 56,000 US hotels already providing some sort of broadband services, the question is how long can the rest afford to wait?

Building a hotel or motel from scratch? Then pay the wiring contractor a little extra to install CAT5e and RJ-45 termination boxes to the intended writing desk location in every room, and terminate them at a patch panel in the locked Telco closet. Hire a professional wireless consultant to tell you where to place the CAT5e ceiling terminations for Wi-Fi access points, terminating those in your Telco room as well. This future-proofing will save a fortune in later cable routing and guest disruption.

Imagine your hotel or motel is already constructed and operating today. A number of your guests have already made it abundantly clear that you need to get broadband Internet if you are going to see them again. So the question is, do you go wired or wireless?

Offering wired broadband is one approach to consider, as there is not a hint of rocket science involved with running CAT5e cables to every room, but there will be a lot of disruption and redecorating involved. In addition your guests will only have one RJ-45 network jack in each room – what happens when two or more people want to have a meeting together with Internet access?

And what happens when guests want to have in-room meetings, or access the Internet from any of the public areas?


An Oregon hotel Nigel Ballard stayed at in April 2003. They’d just had wired Internet installed, and it was unfortunately very easy to spot the aftermarket wiring.

There is a networking technology that carries both voice (phone) and data (Internet) over the existing CAT3 phone cables. The problem with this approach from an investment protection perspective is that every solution offered is 100% proprietary, so you end up being tied to the success or failure of one company. And many of these data-over-phone-line companies have failed in the last two years.

Perform a cost analysis of the components (both phone room and guest room) over a typical 125-room property, and you will discover that broadband over phone wires proves to be a very expensive proposition.

Wireless Fidelity, or Wi-Fi, is the name of a specific wireless standard called 802.11 (which comes in a, b, and g flavors).

Wi-Fi is enormously popular – it is supported by a global standard, requires no FCC operating license, and simply put, it works great! Sales of Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) and laptop adapter cards have taken the industry by storm. Many business laptops and high-end PDAs now come standard with integrated Wi-Fi; it is making significant inroads to the home consumer market as well.

Wi-Fi can already be found in more than 8,000 US hotels, over 12,000 Starbucks, and all major airports, plus thousands of other locations such as convention centers, coffee shops and malls.

Converting an entire hotel property into a broadband location is quick and surprisingly inexpensive using the Wi-Fi approach. CAT5e wiring only needs to be run to the Wi-Fi APs; since these APs are typically hidden in suspended ceilings, guest rooms are never entered thus providing a fast and low disruption solution.

A 125-room three-story hotel of wood construction can typically be completely served throughout by six commercial-grade APs (i.e., six cables instead of 125 cables for a wired hotel). And now you can fill any of the guest rooms with multiple users all able to surf the Internet at high speed using their laptops. All public areas are covered as well – reception, bars, restaurants and pool areas now benefit from having invisible yet fast Internet access, thanks to Wi-Fi.

The most popular Wi-Fi standard in use today is 802.11b, and by Q3 2003 the standards body will have added the faster 802.11g standard to the roster. The US also employs the 802.11a standard, which is proving less popular because of higher deployment costs. Operating at 5GHz, the a standard suffers poor penetration through solid objects such as walls and floors. Hospitality locations are typically full of dividing walls, and are better served by 802.11b or g, which operate at 2.4 GHz and offer much greater penetration.

Security should always be a concern on any network, wired or wireless. I always install commercial-grade networking equipment ensuring nobody gains access to the network unless they are duly authorized. I also engineer the network to isolate each user’s traffic, so guests cannot see each others computers.

If data security is a corporate concern, I always recommend they adopt a VPN security policy for all remote workers whether they are accessing the corporate network from home or from a remote hotel.

As already outlined, with any form of wired network, the guest must be physically tethered to the single RJ-45 data jack in the wall. This becomes especially problematic in conference rooms hosting large numbers of people – imagine 60 wall jacks and 60 patch cables snaked across the floor to serve just 60 attendees.

With a wireless installation, however, the solution is invisible, and you can accommodate as many laptops as your guests need with no wall jacks and no cords to trip over!

The public areas are also much better served with a wireless approach. Guests enjoy sitting in the lobby areas, in the bar or by the pool and connecting to the Internet. Wireless makes that possible in a cost effective and unobtrusive way.

While some hospitality centers are experimenting with charging their customers for wireless access, most industry analysts agree that wireless services will undergo a transition to commodity status within the next 12 months. Failing to do so is considered the surest way to wave goodbye to those valuable business guests.

So, if a hospitality location were to install Wi-Fi throughout today, they would have about one year of revenue opportunity to recoup the costs right about the time they are forced to give it away free.

Industry publications report both rapid take-up of the service with no noticeable rate resistance to the average $9.95 daily access charge.

I don’t personally believe in the revenue sharing model as I feel it is fundamentally flawed. I and others in the industry are acutely aware that Hospitality broadband will be a bundled service within a year as competing locations are forced to fold it into the standard room rate.

Large corporations often publish staff directories where approved hospitality locations are listed, and one of the deciding factors is high-speed connectivity.

If hospitality locations cater to business clientele, they need to provide the services guests consider important. High-speed Internet access throughout the hotel is clearly the hot ticket. Additionally, staff will benefit when management computers are connected to the backbone, providing a robust and speedy connection for corporate communication, reservations, and other back office systems. With more chains large and small unwiring every day, how much longer can business-focused hospitality locations afford not to go broadband?

Nigel Ballard is Director of Wireless for Matrix Networks in Portland, Oregon (www.mtrx.com). He can be reached at (503) 513 9125 or nigelb@mtrx.com