11 Tips to Maximize Your Bandwidth

Lana Sappa
2 min read

In a recent interview with the new VP of Hospitality at Windstream, Don Reigel, reveals the largest technology challenge for the industry—bandwidth.

“As hotel guests continue to travel with more devices and the amount of data they access over the network continues to skyrocket, access to high-speed Internet and expanded bandwidth is going to continue to be the biggest challenge for IT managers within hotels. Demand for bandwidth is only going to keep rising.”

Here are 11 tips on how to get the most out of your current bandwidth capacity and network infrastructure:

1. Under-promise and over-deliver
2. Provide adequate amounts of bandwidth to keep quest satisfaction up
a. Groups and conferences should get priority
b. Consider offering priority and/or discounted plans to loyalty guests
3. Use load balancers to combine low reliability/high bandwidth with high reliability/low bandwidth circuits
4. Shop bandwidth every year or more, since prices frequently change
5. Keep it fair: Ensure that guests with multiple devices share bandwidth among those devices
6. Keep it consistent: Allow guests that purchase premium access in the guest rooms to get those same speeds throughout your property
7. Use intelligent antennas/radios (e.g. Ruckus beam shaping)
8. More power/APs to better handle mobile devices
9. Use a guest Internet management platform, like Eleven, to optimize your existing infrastructure
10. Plug into current PMS and other third party systems
11. Measure and monitor performance with bandwidth and usage reports

 

What’s your biggest hotel technology challenge?