Today I gave a presentation at HITEC, the world’s largest hospitality technology event. Originally, I only wanted to pitch the use of bandwidth management technology to provide a business-grade hotel Internet access with quality of service guarantees for important applications. But after talking with a number of property managers and companies that provide IT services to them, another big issue came up: copyright infringements by guests for which the hotel as the Internet access provider is liable.

Guests’ Copyright Violations a Big Issue

It is common that hotel guests use peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and file hosting service (e.g. RapidShare, MegaUpload) to download often copyright protected material. In many countries, including the United States and Canada, ISPs and the content industry are monitoring such activities and send take-down notices to hotels. Losing its Internet access even for a short time is of course a huge problem to a hotel where guests, particularly business travelers, require a functioning Internet access.

The solution from the perspective of property managers is quite simple: use a DPI system to block access to P2P file sharing networks and file hosting sites. Optionally, access can be re-enabled on guest requests along with having them agree on terms and conditions that explicitly prohibit illegal downloads. Any download activity would then be closely monitored.

This kind of traffic management is mainly in the interest of the properties. The second application I talked about provides clear benefits for both sides.

Business-Grade Internet Access

Hotel guests, particularly business travelers, regularly complain about poor Internet connectivity from their hotel rooms, no matter if access is free or they have to pay for it. WiFi cells are badly congested and the overall access bandwidth is insufficient to sustain the ever increasing demand. The same applications that are to blame for copyright violations also cause this overload.

A DPI bandwidth management system can solve this problem very easily, too. Simply assign all these bandwidth-hungry applications a lower priority, and give business critical tools such as e-mail, Skype or other VoIP systems, VPN and Web browsing a higher priority. This can even be offered selectively per guest at an additional charge.

Both sides will benefit from this: guests are happy with the high-quality Internet access, which makes them return and spread the word. Hotels can increase their revenue by charging for business-grade Internet while curbing their bandwidth upgrade costs. The classic win-win situation!

Tags: bandwidth management, copyright infringement, HITEC, hotel, Skype, VPN, WiFi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 23:56:16 by Klaus Mochalski. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.