Hospitality matters Bandwidth on-demand: Enhancing the guest experience with affordable high-speed Internet A leadership perspectives white paper Recommended next steps for business and industry executives Issue 8 in a series
Executive Summary Look on TripAdvisor, Expedia, Yelp and Boo or any other of the hundreds of reputational websites where consumers make recommendations based on their hotel stay, café or restaurant experience, and it is all too apparent that it is the quality of the Internet connection provided to guests and customers which frequently draws most of the criticisms. More than the quality of the room-service food, the comfort of the bed or the size of the in-room flat-screen plasma TV, online polls show that 40% of hotel guests see Wi-Fi availability and Internet access as a deal-breaker when choosing where to book a stay. Broadband wireless Internet access is no longer a nice to have, but an absolute necessity in the hospitality industry, and businesses in the sector are finding it hard to keep up with soaring demand. Hotel guest now expect an in-home experience when they travel, and want to access their preferred applications with the same speed and quality of service. Bandwidth consumption by meeting groups in hotels and convention centres is also growing significantly faster in Dubai than perhaps anywhere else in the world. A service provider like du can supply bandwidth on-demand as a managed service, in a way that guarantees availability and temporarily increases bandwidth dynamically. It helps optimise the utilisation of available bandwidth, and makes sure that access services are provisioned at maximum speed to the hotel s staff and guests at all times. Internet access can be prioritised for the right users at the right time, in accordance with specific rules set by the hotel. This results in direct cost savings for the hotel, and a better experience for the guest. Produced by du
Business case overview With the introduction of smart phones and tablets, people have begun to arrive at hotels with multiple wireless devices in hand, putting considerable stress on hotel Internet access networks. In fact, studies show that over 15% of guests are now carrying a trio of smartphone, tablet and PC devices into their hotel rooms. Many hotels have only a few megabits of capacity to share among hundreds of potential users in their guest rooms, restaurants, cafes and administrative offices. This may be sufficient when occupancy rates are low. Equally, it is adequate for light use such as e-mail. But hotel guests now want fast Internet access to watch a high-definition streaming video on their laptop, tablet or smart-phone. Teenagers want to be free to run a broadband-hungry gaming or peer-to-peer file sharing application from their hotel bedroom, while someone on a business trip may need to participate in a video conference. The picture gets even more complex because demand for broadband in hotels changes with the time of day. Back-office usage normally peaks during the day and in some properties after midnight, with the electronic closing of the previous business day. Meeting rooms are normally busiest during the day. Meanwhile, the guest rooms have the highest bandwidth demand typically in the morning and the evening. This varied and upward demand for broadband in hotels is pushing up the need for bandwidth at an accelerating pace. A study carried out for infrastructure and networking supplier Cisco in 2010 suggested that the underlying rate of growth was around 4.4% per month. This is equivalent to an annual CAGR of around 60%. In terms of usage of bandwidth in the hotel industry various studies have revealed a fluctuating profile among guests: most bandwidth is now used by guests watching streamed media of films, TV programmes and music videos. 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report Application type Bandwidth appetite position Aggregate amount of bandwidth used Real-time entertainment 1 43% Web browsing 2 20% Peer-to-peer file sharing 3 19% Real-time communications 4 3% Social networking 5 2.5% Other, gaming, secure tunnelling, etc. 12% Source: Sandvine Intelligent Broadband Networks
The chart below taken from a Cisco study indicates a typical usage pattern seen in hotels (these were across the US, but the picture will be very similar in the UAE) is a peak download of around 5 megabytes per room from 10 pm to 11pm, with uploads broadly constant at about 0.75 megabytes per hour per room. Studies also reveal that most hotel chains there are serious under-provisioned. When the available bandwidth (average connection speed averaged across all US hotels samples) is divided by the average total number of rooms in the hotel there is a broad distribution, with a mean service per room of just 220 Kbps and a median of around 22 Kbps. This median connection speed is unlikely to result in a consistently excellent customer experience. Bandwidth in computer networking refers to the data rate supported by a network connection or interface. Bandwidth represents the capacity of the connection. The greater the capacity, the more likely that greater performance will follow (though overall performance also depends on other factors, such as latency). 6 Typical Internet usage pattern in a US hotel 5 Megabytes per room 4 3 2 1 0 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Download Upload Source: Cisco Produced by du
Understanding the nature of the problem Kempinski, Crowne Plaza, Renaissance and Marriott are among many big name hotel chains leading the way forward with technology that ensures they provide the highest quality of Internet services to guests. They have installed dedicated Internet traffic management devices that combine multiple ISP services to boost connectivity and increase overall bandwidth. In the UAE, bandwidth-on-demand is one solution provided by du and being used by increasing numbers of hotels, which describes a connection in which a customer hotel s (or restaurant s) available bandwidth can be increased for short periods of time on an as-needed basis. It prevents Internet services from slowing during periods of high use. By increasing the capacity available in a burst to address a spike of usage, hotel and restaurant premises can provide the highest speed Internet access to guests without having to commit to the expense of a bigger broadband pipe. Currently, most bandwidth is sold on an access time basis, with little regard to the value of quality of service or quantity used. With bandwidth-on-demand, a hotel or restaurant chain would no longer buy huge amounts of bandwidth upfront. They could buy it only as their customers need it. A hotel s guest experience can be constrained by fixed bandwidth broadband provision, but thanks to du s Bandwidth on Demand, it is possible to provision a fixed base-line service on top of which the hotel can take extra bandwidth capacity on-demand, to suit its fluctuating business needs, guest requirements, occupancy rates and the hosting of inhotel special events. It provides the hospitality industry with a reliable and cost-effective way to balance the commercials of broadband provision with the richness of guest experience.
It allows the hotel guest to subscriber to an Internet services that meets their budget and service expectations. So, one guest might want to subscriber for the duration of their stay to a premium in-room services that give them access on a pay-as-you-go basis to a dedicated 10MB line. Another may prefer a more budget-friendly shared-access to a 50MB services. All the while they and all other guests can enjoy free in-lobby WiFi access. Such a solution provides hotels and their customers with the choices they want. It provides new revenue generation opportunities for the hotel, helps it build differentiation from the competition, while at the same time proving to be more reliable in the context of the high-speed access that hotel guests now take for granted. Internet access for business meetings can be better managed. It allows overall usage by the hospitality business to exceed a specified threshold for brief periods of time, without the hotel or restaurant chain facing a huge bill. It effectively means hospitality businesses can deliver excellent customer experience without having to buy a more expensive higher capacity Internet service. The plan provides a guaranteed high level of Internet access that comes with additional bandwidth, delivered on-demand and generally billed at a slightly higher rate. Simply by installing a du management gateway alongside the Internet ISP gateway, a hotel s IT team can pull down burstable bandwidth on an as-needed basis. The advantages of such a service are numerous: Always available high-speed connections. Ability to charge guests in different ways for different bandwidth packages. Works across DSL, wireless or hybrid technology. Provides highly reliable business centre connectivity for videoconferencing applications. Provides highly available Internet access for one-off events and/or ad hoc meeting room connectivity. All Internet access is password protected and secured. Caters also to lobby and common area WiFi connectivity requirements. Produced by du
Billing for usage brings business opex benefits As well as being able to better handle the normal peaks and troughs of everyday bandwidth requirements, bandwidth on-demand opens a door onto the introduction by hotel chains of high-definition video links and conferencing suites for use in events and virtual business meetings. Quality videoconferencing can allow a conference to import a guest speaker who is unable to travel, while preserving or even enhancing the audience interaction with a live speaker. Commonly, hotels buy their Internet services from a telco or ISP as a bundle or package that is specified according to the average consumption over a specified period of time, usually a month. The problem is that they can find themselves left short at times, when demand exceeds expectations. This is commonly seen when a hotel hosts an industry conference or large business event. Not only can the process of provisioning the extra bandwidth needed for that event be slow, but if estimates of usage during the event fall short of demand the customer experience suffers as a result. If it is over provisioned, the hotel and its client are charged for resources that are not utilised. Usually an Internet service provider will charge businesses a flat rate for unlimited use, with the monthly bill set by the maximum speed band chosen by the customer be that 4, 8, 16 or 24 Mb per second. An alternative billing model is to pay for the total data transfer capacity used over a month, with a specified data transfer capacity delivered for free and with any extra bandwidth or data transfers over and above that incurring an additional charge. In both cases, the service might fall short of expectations at periods of very high usage, or bandwidth could remain unused or charges become painfully high during periods of over utilisation.
The alternative of bandwidth on-demand enables a hospitality business to request a boost in the available bandwidth for a short period to meet peaks in usage, without having to contract for any increased capacity they will only need occasionally. Both types of these quota and consumption-based billing options do not adequately address the problems of Internet traffic optimisation and congestion management, however. It can lead to latency, jitter, and round-trip-delay are technical characteristics of communications systems that affect their usability for particular applications. Voice and video communications, and a variety of other applications, including online gaming and financial trading, are particularly sensitive to high latency. A difference in latency of as little as 1 or 2 milliseconds can be significant. Jitter reflects the timing variation experienced by users of a service. So-called load balancing technology helps ensure hotels can provide the very highest quality of Internet services to their guests. Rather than buying ever bigger capacity connections, the systems installed by these leading hotels allows bandwidth-hungry applications to be automatically routed through the best Internet service available, while email and non-critical web browsing traffic can be pushed across less-expensive connections. It is one other way of ensuring better Internet experience for guests and diners. This is the eighth in a regular series of Leadership Perspectives White Papers, produced by du in association with Ovum, a preferred knowledge partner. For more information, please email managedservices@du.ae or visit www.du.ae Printed on environmentally-friendly paper produced from sustainable sources. Produced by du