My latest tour through London has taken me to the hottest hotels around town, such as the Crowne Plaza London City and the Wyndham Chelsea Harbour. I also had the pleasure of popping into The Langham with our Head of Content design, Peter Torbet. Peter was visiting the Langham to work on some new features to the In-Room Entertainment menu with the hotel’s marketing team. After seeing the brilliant work he had done so far, I made a comment about everything being so "pink" and asked why this colour was all over the Television screen. "You'll see when we get there" he said. Indeed, looking around this beautiful property and the rooms, I had to realise that everything was even more "pink.”

I could tell right away that The Langham TV and Internet portal that Peter and the Graphics team worked on was completely in-line with the hotel surroundings. I could immediately feel that Acentic had not just put in our product, but tailored it so that it would fall right into this space completely naturally. Rumour has it that tourists visiting London will get picked up at Heathrow by Taxis and will simply jump in the cab and request, "take me to the pink hotel!" Every single taxi driver, and there must be thousands, will take these guests to The Langham - no questions asked.

This all goes to show how a brand and the associated styles can really impact a guest's, and even the taxi driver's, memory. When developing Acentic’s latest Panorama HD and Horizon product and the fully customizable graphical user interface, the Core-GUI, it was of paramount importance that any and all styling and branding requests could be fulfilled. Paired with the improved user experience that was developed through years of customer feedback, you simply can't avoid getting the feeling that the customer had chosen just the right product for such a fabulous place.

Wouldn‘t the world be a better place if there weren‘t any criminals on the loose? Who‘d need police? And, just imagine the costs governments, companies and individuals would save if they didn‘t need lawyers.

This thought brings us to the hotel industry. Many hoteliers are facing accusations by legal authorities about hotel guests purposely committing internet crimes by entering and downloading illegal material through the hotels’ internet gateways. This ranges from major crimes like hacking military facilities to the simple stuff like running a peer-to-peer client for downloading music illegally. The associated fines can range anywhere from €1,000 to millions of Euros.

What we need to remember about the internet is that it’s based on numbers just like the telephone is. If someone on one side of the world notices that their system is being compromised, all they see is a series of numbers calling them.

Now, imagine someone using their room phone in a hotel to threaten someone with a bomb attack at an international airport. This sounds like the stuff movies are made of, but it has happened and when it does, the hotel is on the line because the police only have the hotel’s phone number. It’s up to the hotelier to inform the police who was in the room at the time the call was made.

The same scenario applies to the internet which is even more troublesome because guests are literally “dialling out” on your main extension which is the hotel’s public IP address. Your telephone system can tell you who actually committed the crime, but does your internet installation do the same?

With Acentic Horizon hoteliers can answer these questions with confidence. Acentic Horizon can log deep into each individually browsed website in the room. And because there is also the need to comply with local legislation and privacy regulations, the Horizon logging facility is configurable to the individual obligations.

In each of the scenarios our customers have faced to date, Acentic Horizon was able to identify the criminals even if it was in-room guests, drive-by visitors or conference participants, effectively taking the hotels or system owners out of the game through one simple phone call which allowed them to focus on their core business.

Free access to the internet, but safe for your data or your computer? Not at all.

Recently one of Acentic’s employees was traveling and seeking to get some good internet connectivity at his hotel. When he was finally connected he sent me an email with the subject: "This email is sent courtesy of our “xxx competitor.”  He had actually discovered that he was able to send emails through a competitor’s gateway without paying for the service. 

So we did a little investigation on this and it seemed that the competitor's gateway was only blocking from surfing the web and a couple of other standard services, but wasn't able to lock him out of Acentic’s own email service. Now we're not using anything unusual - it's a server from a company that probably has millions of installations in the world. In fact he was also able to connect to Acentic’s VPN service, which accidentally runs on the same protocol as our e-mail service, and with this active he was able to use the Internet to its fullest without paying a single cent.
 
Now obviously we weren't the only ones that have discovered this "loophole". A German journalist actually wrote an article about six months after our employee discovered it. In the article the author described exactly what our employee was experiencing. After this report showed up in the German Linux Magazine the provider hurried to close this loophole.
 
The reporter had analyzed the problem in detail and detected that the gateway was not really using a controlled firewall but rather detecting certain "known" applications on the network and redirecting them if the client hadn't paid. Everything that was unknown to the gateway (or rather that the developer hadn't thought of), would just pass through. Who knows how much revenue this provider has lost in the six months that have gone by - probably hundreds of thousands. Attention to security is as key as return on investment is. As providers of an essential service to guests, many of which send and receive confidential information, we take particular care to avoid such loopholes through extensive testing prior to release. Who knows what other holes the provider may have left open. To think that you're sitting there with no "real" firewall doesn't give you a very good feeling about using hotel high speed internet.
 
On Acentic Horizon, our high speed internet access solution, this is not a problem because we are using a far more advanced architecture that utilizes a controlled firewall - so loopholes are a thing of the past. It's either you've paid or you haven't with no way of bypassing this. And a good firewall, that even includes intrusion detection functionality with the added benefit of a truly enterprise class Wi-Fi installation, will give our customers the peace of mind they need.