These days, internet accessibility when staying at a hotel is more important than ever. Between travelers working on the road and leisure travelers binging on Netflix, hotels have to do everything they can to offer the best, and fastest, internet possible. To accomplish this, hotels must be sure they’re offering enough bandwidth. Fred Reeder, chief commercial and operating officer of Nomadix, a company that offers bandwidth management solutions, shares the importance of offering internet that holds up to guest standards.
There seems to be a growing need for safer, faster, and increased bandwidth at hotels. How can a hotel hit all of those benchmarks? Bandwidth demand, especially in the hospitality space, seems to be insatiable. There are really three factors that you could pinpoint that correlate to guest satisfaction—connectivity speed, the quality of the connection, and the speed and quality of the servers. Internet usage has become a utility, and guests don’t want power failures the same way they wouldn’t expect to run out of water in a hotel. You can’t have dropouts or poor connectivity. Having the right equipment goes a long way toward facilitating that reliable connection.
Is internet availability really as important as power and running water? At this point, internet access is no longer just an amenity; it is a force utility that can drive reservations and sales. It is something that should be invisible, expected, and routine. So, the analogy for me is that you don’t want to ever be in a position where you tell guests “look we don’t quite have quite enough water coming in to the hotel, so if you take a shower, make sure you don’t flush the toilet because there’s not enough water coming in.” With technology, you should never have a situation where guests are restricted from using the internet the way they need to use the internet.
What can hoteliers use to improve bandwidth both short- and long-term? You can’t just increase bandwidth, you have to use it in a more efficient way. Nomadix offers products and solutions that help hotels optimize the use of the bandwidth by preventing illegal downloads or Netflix monopolies so that there is equitable use by all guests. We can also help hotels analyze trends and plan and provide the best internet service.
What bandwidth innovations can we expect in the near future? From a bandwidth perspective, the usage is going to grow. As a result, we are looking at what those networks are going to look like in the future from an infrastructure perspective and that’s why we introduced fiber connectivity capabilities. We do see a trend toward fiber optic networks as opposed to cooper wire networks, and we’re building that into our capabilities. We’re also keeping an eye on the consolidation of technology and an infrastructure where you’ll have fewer devices with more capabilities built into it.
