Demand for bandwidth soars with business travel
By MARTHA C. WHITE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Until recently, travelers attending conferences or trade shows had simple Internet needs. They would check e-mail and maybe look up information on the Web or connect to the home office.
Now, meetings are likely to include streaming video and online interaction. And back in their rooms, travelers are downloading movies and logging on to peer-to-peer networks.
Event organizers and hotels and conference centers are struggling to keep up and prevent Internet gridlock.
"We've known for a long time that bandwidth was going to be an issue in hotels," said Don O'Neal, a hotel technology consultant.
Erika Powell, a meeting planner for Global Knowledge, a company that provides software training to corporate clients, said she was recently forced to move an event because the hotel's Internet connection could not keep up with her group's demands.
"On Monday, we started getting reports that the Internet was very slow and they weren't able to access the labs," she said. "We communicated with the facility to find out what the problem was, but they were at a loss."
Powell said she had to pull up stakes and relocate her students to another nearby hotel in the middle of the week so their training could be completed without slowdowns.
As recently as a few years ago, a type of connection called a T1 line was the norm for most hotels. With speeds of 1.5 megabits a second, it was robust enough for e-mail and Web browsing. (By comparison, an average at-home cable modem offers 3 to 4 megabits a second.)
The advent of cheap, user-friendly -- but bandwidth-heavy -- streaming video technology changed the status quo drastically. Demand at hotels and convention centers has spiked, as businesses add videoconferencing to their meetings and guests download media.
Adding to the logjam, hotel managers are moving toward Web-based tools for managing back-of-the-house departments, using more bandwidth, too.
Most business hotels now have added more T1s or a T3 (also referred to as a DS3), which accommodates 28 T1s of traffic. Other hotels are installing fiber optics, which also offer large bandwidth capacity.
Many of these new systems are what technology specialists term burstable, meaning they have a typical 6 or 8 megabit-a-second rate of transmission but are capable of sustaining many times that amount of traffic if necessary.
The demand at convention centers has escalated as well. "Our customers are expecting an in-home experience when they travel," said John Adams, general manager of the Colorado Convention Center in Denver and a senior vice president for the western region of the convention center management firm SMG.
"Technology changes so quickly, and meetings have become increasingly more interactive."
The annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which will be held Jan. 8-11, bears this out. Exhibitors at the show used 353 Internet connections in 2008, up from 51 in 1999.
With a projected attendance of more than 130,000, thousands of people may be logging on to the network to check their e-mail at any time, for instance, and the demand for video is similarly strong. In addition, many trade-show organizers now use Web-based registration systems to process their attendees, which takes more bandwidth.
seattlepi.nwsource.com |
