Yet so far only 6 percent of Wyndham's guests have taken advantage of those high-speed wires. By comparison, 55 percent of the chain's guests watch adult material on TV, and 35 percent watch first-run movies. "It's the early-adoption stage," Hedley says. "As more demands are placed on the business traveler to use the hotel room as an extension of his or her office, that penetration rate is going to go up."
Maybe so, but for that to happen, hotels and travelers will have to overcome some significant technical hurdles. Like the Ritz-Carlton, most hotels that offer broadband access do so in the form of wired Ethernet, with speeds varying from 1Mbps to 100Mbps. That often means running cables to each room and installing wall jacks. Typically, the hotel provides the Ethernet cables; guests without Ethernet cards for their laptops are out of luck. Hotels are also experimenting with wireless access, which at a minimum requires guests to bring a wireless PC card; in some cases, guests must also have a subscription with the hotel's chosen wireless service provider. In that case, hotels need to install wireless transceivers on each floor.
The problem with both wired and wireless access is that guests must supply crucial hardware - specifically, an Ethernet card - themselves. And even if a traveler carries around an Ethernet card, his or her laptop may not be able to use the hotel's broadband connection to do anything useful.
"Right now, with an Ethernet- connected laptop, you can get Web access," says Bruce Rosenberg, Hilton's senior VP of e-business. "But that's not the killer app. Our users need to get back to their corporate network." For that to happen, the guest's company must enable virtual private networking - which would allow guests to access their companies' networks via the Net. VPN technology is spreading, says Rosenberg, but not as fast as hotels are wiring.
Because of these technical hurdles, Hilton is testing alternative technologies, including Internet-enabled television, wireless access and even Internet-enabled telephones with 14-inch monitors. Starwood's W Hotel in San Francisco is doing the same, offering Internet TV (with a wireless keyboard) and a high-speed Ethernet jack in every room; the hotel plans to try out wireless in its "living room" lobby this summer.
Some hotels are hesitant to provide broadband service at all, says Dylan Brooks, an analyst for Jupiter Media Metrix, because more and more guests are carrying their access with them. "The rapid growth in wireless phones - and, looking into the future, Internet-enabled wireless phones - threatens to do to a hotel's broadband services what those same cell phones did to their telephone revenue," Brooks explains.
