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It has been difficult for travelers looking for good Internet access on the road. It was once hard to find a Wi-Fi connection, since most hotels only had an ethernet port. However, times have changed as most hotels have decided to add Wi-Fi hot-spots. The issue is no longer Wi-Fi access, but Wi-Fi service. It can be very frustrating for travelers who find a very poor or nonexistent Internet service at a hotel that advertises "High-Speed" Bandwidth. Some are starting to blame the iPad.

In a recent New York Times article, iBAHN, an Internet provider for hotels and the meeting industry blames iPads for poor Wi-Fi service at hotels. They say the iPad consumes more than four times the amount of bandwidth than an average smart-phone. But is this the whole story?

iBAHN's survey is flawed as it compares an iPad to a typical smart-phone. First, it is hard to define what a "typical" smart-phone is, but today's iPhones and Androids probably are not among them. Second, an iPad should be compared with a netbook or laptop, not a typical smart-phone. The question is how much bandwidth does an iPad consume compared with a typical laptop? I would say they are pretty close to an iPad since they are often used as laptop replacements.

This Wi-Fi service issue is not about the iPad, but about how the Internet is used in today's society. People are using the Internet more than ever before as bandwidth speeds and broadband access continue to increase, while dialup modems become a museum piece. Instead of just checking email and looking at a few static webpages, users are video chatting, watching movies, communicating through text and images in real time, and syncing files across the Internet. The telecommunications industry has been rapidly increasing bandwidth and speeds to meet the demands of their users. At the same time, the hotel industry has not been keeping up.

Now that the hotel industry has fallen well behind the curve, they are thinking about creating a tiered Wi-Fi system to help pay for better service. It's a good thing there are so many hotels out there, as it will allow the market to decide how Internet access gets payed for at hotels. There are already hotels that offer real high-speed Internet access for their customers. It will be very difficult to persuade customers to pay for fast Internet access when others provide it for free.

One thing is is for certain, this is not about the iPad, it's about internet usage. Blaming a product that efficiently uses services hotels claim they do very well at providing is just silly. Internet use will accelerate with or without the iPad. In fact, it is easier to get on the Internet with the iPad than a laptop because of the iPad's 3G connection. iPads with 3G may in fact be helping the hotel situation rather than hurting it. In the end, the market will weed out those hotels who don't keep up and get left behind.

1 Comment

1. Leland ~ October 30, 2011 01:52
   I think that many hotels just don't have the capacity. I travel regularly for work with a group of between 60-100 people, and probably every one of them has a laptop. Whenever we descend upon a hotel and get settled into our rooms, which themselves are often grouped together, the download speeds take a nosedive; in some places, we overwhelm the hotel's network and people get dropped. We've come to expect it, especially when we're using Netflix, browsing the web, and video chatting with our families back home. Whenever I travel alone, however, it's not nearly as bad. But, I would expect that large groups of people, especially those attending conventions and such, would regularly blast hotel networks with demands for which they didn't plan. My outlook is not as rosy as yours, though. I don't think that the market will discourage hotels from tiered pricing. If anything, more and more hotels will charge for wifi access simply because they can. It's like the hoteliers in Les Miserables -- "Charge 'em for the mice, extra for the lights, two percent for looking in the mirror twice." You won't find a situation where the sole hotel near the airport with free wifi is filled to capacity while the other six can't attract anyone. Heck, it's rare for an expensive hotel (think Waldorf Astoria) to have free internet.

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