Good piece in this morning's NYT about high-speed access in hotel rooms. While many travellers find high-speed connectivity essential (I often book hotels after first consulting the Geektels directory), the actual connections are plagued with problems. Ironically, these aren't connection problems per se, but rather problems with complex billing systems that hijack your connection and try to route you back to a billing screen at seemingly random intervals (at the Crystal City Hyatt in DC last month, I found myself dealing with a non-billing system that wanted me to repeatedly tell it my name and company affiliation before giving me a connection, even though the connection itself was free!). Some systems even require you to install software or (jeesh) hardware before granting you access. These systems significantly raise the cost of providing the service, and turn into enormous support nightmares that the technically unsophisticated hotel staff can't cope with. I'd estimate that about three quarters of these systems result in support calls when I encounter them — and every one of them is different (and some of them break if you have software running that tries to connect to the Internet when it senses a network connection, like AOL Instant Messenger, an RSS reader, or a mailer — the billing system receives multiple network requests that it answers with its "Please sign on" screen before you've got a browser open, and then decides that you're a bad actor and refuses to allow you in, so you've got to quit all your open apps before plugging in the wire).
The upshot is that the free connection services — open WiFi, free DSL modems — are far, far cheaper to deploy and use, and cost significantly less to support (in Helsinki, I stayed at a hotel where WiFi access required you to go downstairs to the front desk and pay cash for a scratch-off card with a 24-hour WiFi password — how's that for a customer-unfriendly, labor-intensive process?). And since hotel guests want the service, free connectivity can give your hotel a competitive advantage at a lower cost than the for-pay alternatives — and best of all, you'll never get orphaned by a tanking hotspot business like the old MobileStar system, because a free, bog-standard connection system can be supported by any moderately skilled technician.
One place where he stayed this year, Mr. Plume said, got it just right: the Reneson Hotel Group's Best Western Novato Oaks Inn in Novato, Calif., where all he had to do was plug a cable into his laptop to get quick Internet access by digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., a telephone company service. And it was free.
"No hardware, no software, no nothing –it's the easiest setup I've ever seen," Mr. Plume said, adding that the hotel's Internet service was the deciding factor in where he stayed on regular trips to Novato last winter.
