I find it interesting how many guests now expect broadband Internet for free within a hotel room. I suppose most hotel guests are unaware of the fixed costs that a hotelier must incur to have a quality broadband system that delivers reliable connections day in and day out. Non-functioning broadband can lead to high costs for the hotelier. This was a problem that I recently discovered while on a stay in a European airport hotel. I entered my room after a long flight and I was eager to start working and listen to the champions league game over web radio. I proceeded to remove all the paper from the desk. That’s another random thought I had, do guests actually read all that clutter on the desk of the hotel room? Hoteliers should check out our iTV and mobile applications for intelligent guest communication. After removing the paper, I sought to connect to the web. My immediate reaction was to find the WiFi network. That was non-existent. I next looked for the wired connection, which led me to look in all the drawers of the room and even the closet for that elusive cable. After a while of searching I had to take the elevator down to reception, who directed me to the concierge. Finally I was back up to my room and 10 minutes later I received a visit from a very apologetic member of the hotel staff who handed me the prized cable. It still only took me 10 minutes of trying to get the connection to work, 10 minutes on a helpdesk line to someone on the other side of the planet who told me she would warn the hotel technician. At least a half an hour later I had to once again call reception who immediately sent a technician up to replace the faulty modem, only to find that the connection still didn’t work. After all of that, they gave me a room change where everything worked perfectly. How much time/effort/money do you think that cost the hotel?

Imagine sitting in a hotel bar and buying a movie and Internet bundle on your iPhone so you can access the hotel’s WiFi. When you’ve finished your drink, head upstairs to your room and watch the movie you purchased on your television. At the same time, you can access the Internet on both your laptop and iPhone, without paying twice.

Up until now, the hotel industry has lacked true convergence between the TV user interface experience and the interface used for high speed Internet access. Hotels need to embrace this new approach where guests can pay for the Internet, surf the web, buy movie bundles and utilize guest services on screens across all platforms, such as the television, laptop, iPad and smart phone.

The challenge for hoteliers is to create the same look and feel across the board so that hotel branding is consistent on the “purchase page” of all platforms. Once the hotel masters that (done easily with Acentic’s Core GUI cross-platform approach), they can also cross-merchandise. This is a huge step forward to build new revenue streams. On the log-in pages where movies are advertised, hotels can now upsell with incentives to buy the full bundle package for use on all devices.
 
Acentic’s Core GUI also allows the guest to access the Internet from two devices. For example, as mentioned above, someone with a laptop and iPhone can access the Internet on both devices, but pay only once regardless of where they are in the hotel – their room, the bar or restaurant, lobby or other public areas.
 
Acentic is offering this convergence now as a chance to boost revenue. In hotels that have launched the Acentic Core GUI together with Acentic Horizon high-speed Internet solution, the overall revenue has increased by an average of 41 percent compared to the previous year. This innovation is making the hotel stay much easier and more satisfying for guests. In addition to the direct revenue increases, these new products and features are driving a major impact on GSTS (guest satisfaction).

Let’s give guests a more enjoyable stay and less headaches while making money on more bundles purchased!

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.

According to recent statistics, over 20 million people are turning to the internet to meet their true love via online dating. It seems that the days when people left it to destiny, luck (good or bad) and to a few pints down the pub are long gone and all sorts of processes and match algorithms have been developed purely to ensure that you meet the ultimate partner. All of this match making, of course, needs a broadband connection in order for the user to get the true benefit of the online experience. Broadband is another thing which shouldn’t be left to luck, thankfully we have proven processes to ensure that online daters will have uninterrupted access to their ever more complex services. The downside of course is that all these services encourage the guests to remain in their room rather than amble down to the bar or lobby and see real live people. A transition, which is often made harder by the fact that either a different broadband operator is running the public areas or a second charge is necessary. That’s why Acentic’s HORIZON platform enables easy roaming from the room to the public areas in the hope that guests will move from a virtual environment to an environment where they can spend money at the bar possibly whilst doing their virtual dating.

We recently read a blog post where the author was commenting on people’s ignorance with Wi-Fi and its installation as well as ongoing maintenance costs.
We’ve all overheard people talk about how inexpensive the Wi-Fi in their home is compared to what they pay when they are in a hotel. Listening to such statements we can only assume that most of them tend to forget all parameters that are included in the so called “free” Wi-Fi. They forget that they are paying for line rental, that they are using a consumer line which sees bandwidth drop drastically during peak times, that the consumer modem with built in Wi-Fi needs regular rebooting and that when all the kids and their multiple Wi-Fi devices connect the whole set up comes crashing down. All of which would be a disaster if it happened to a guest in a hotel. Obviously some will turn to their 3G card but when they’ve roamed once or twice they soon realize that the hotel broadband is pretty good value. Even more so if you take the following into account.
A hotel must use a professional (Enterprise Solution) router, which comes with a price tag approaching £1,000 or more, (or in other words, over twice the average personal computer). Wireless access points that work, well, they’re around £300. Depending on construction quality of a hotel and the structure itself (old thick walls, various annexes, separate adjoining buildings etc.), a Wi-Fi system can cost tens of thousands of pounds in equipment alone.
Then there is the challenging installation procedure required in a working hotel environment. The hotel needs to get cabling to these access points and you guessed it, more installation costs courtesy of a qualified cable contractor.
The key is that it SHOULD WORK, not some of the time but all of the time, particularly if your guests are paying for the service. Those complaining of poor signal/quality are likely to be in hotels using cheap products or with insufficient access points, or where connection speeds are too slow because the bandwidth is too small. And of course, Wi-Fi maintenance is not something that takes care of itself either.
So next time you get upset about not having Free Wi-Fi, think about this – a quality product or service that consistently delivers doesn’t come for free!

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.

There was a recent article in PC Magazine that had hoteliers talking about investments they are making to  bring more high tech gadgetry to hotel guestrooms, despite the tough economy. The hoteliers, such as said Page Petry, Marriott's senior vice president of information resources, talked about wanting to give guests access to all the newest in technology, such as IPTV, iPod connectivity, the iPad, and smartphone applications to make it easy to connect in the hotel room and to go way beyond the basic wireless service.

Acentic understands this demand more than most since we are constantly talking to hoteliers about how they can get closer to their guests. With our recent launch of Panorama IP, our customers can now be running converged services like TV, HSIA and VoIP over the same network. The goal is to provide hotel chains with a holistic platform line-up suited to their chosen physical network architecture. The key element here is the potential for cross marketing so it’s important to have a consistent user experience across all hotel locations no matter which network is installed in each hotel.

Most converged service operators only end up converging on your bill with the different services run as separate entities and often managed by different departments. Convergence is much more than a unique bill. Acentic is introducing content promotion on its broadband platform with the objective to drive take up and revenue of iTV services, as well as differentiate its broadband offering. The same will apply with mobile technology moving forward. Each appliance or device should not be seen as a separate content platform but rather as part of a global content strategy driving usage of all services on all devices. The ability to extend, for example, a TV content program with additional applications on the mobile device can significantly increase the life span of a TV content program beyond the simple living room experience.

We recognize that it is also extremely important to remember that the TV is not the PC and we have to keep it simple. Past experience has proven that on-screen interactivity is successful only when the interactive content is relevant to the broadcast program being watched. Stand-alone interactivity with no correlation to the TV viewing experience just doesn’t lead to high take up rates. The implications of this are that interactivity must start from the outset of the creation of a TV program and be seen as a seamless extension. Therefore the majority of TV based Internet content will not be the Internet content we know today but new developments from the TV content world.

The TV remains a passive viewing device and as such, the interactive services and applications must remain as simple and as relevant as possible and be seen as a enhancement to the original passive experience. Program creators will have to adopt new skill sets to fully understand, develop and leverage web-based content. The use of social media may very much act as a tool to generate a following around a program, event and slowly migrate the TV experience away from the individual passive experience to a more sociable environment.

(As posted in videonet, the official IBC blog: http://v-net.tv/Blog.aspx?id=479)

The smart phone is here, who needs a TV? If you listen to the hype surrounding these wonderful machines you could actually remove the TV from the hotel guestroom, thereby ensuring a fairly hefty saving. I played around the other day with some different smart phone applications. Put aside the feeble battery life of most smartphones, I sometimes wonder whether they are meant to be mobile or not. Also aside from the screen size, which had me looking for my glasses and left me with a headache after my various trials, these phones are actually quite amazing.

The first application I downloaded enabled me to watch the BBC world service live. Quite amazing! but after half an hour on the world’s latest disasters I was thirsting for some more mundane entertainment and so I downloaded the application enabling me to watch the top 20 channels of my PayTV provider. Again, pretty neat I thought, as I zapped between channels and watched some intellectually less challenging content. Having lost a couple of viewing points in each eye, I had to give up, switched on the TV to find that actually most of the channels were on there anyway. I tried again a few days later whilst abroad and there it suddenly struck me that due to license issues most of the content wasn’t available where I was. When I finally did find appropriate content that worked the 3G network, it was obviously under pressure and I had to put up with constant buffering. When I got home I also noticed that there was no buffering on the phone bill- nice to see that the Telecom Operators are still able to generate high ROIs!

On my next trip I had learnt my lesson and decided to connect via WiFi to use my smart phone. Interestingly enough the hotel’s HSIA system wouldn’t allow this. My conclusion was that the TV still remains key in the guest room and that the SmartPhone WiFi access Acentic builds into its new HSIA solution, Horizon, will ensure that many guests won’t see their phone bill go through the roof.