Talking technology

The hotel industry has always been in the forefront of innovation: hotels were the first to install gas lamps; the first to replace them with electric light; they were among the first to buy colour televisions, and to add plasma screens.

Now they are leading the way in providing information and entertainment for guests, not purely by the traditional cable TV with "extras" such as in-house movie and hotel information channels, but via the internet.

As guests go online, the choice of services available expands dramatically and the hotel has an opportunity to earn revenue by charging for access to the internet.

However, a precedent set in the USA makes the pricing of these services a sensitive area, particularly for US guests. Local telephone calls in the USA have always been free and, since dial-up internet access is via a local telephone number, that applies to going online, too. In the UK we are used to paying for most of our telephone calls.

There is certainly growing demand for high-speed internet access (HSIA) in hotel rooms, so hotels need to decide now whether they will charge for it, and how much. Consultant Derek Wood says that pricing is key to usage. "Up to this year, the average take-up for high-speed internet access was 3-4% of occupied rooms. Now, guests are being given a choice of paying perhaps 50p a minute, with a cap of £15 in any 24 hours. We're now seeing more than 10% take-up, where it's reasonably priced."

Wood believes that HSIA will eventually be "wrapped up in the room rate" and provided at no extra charge to guests. Some international hotel chains have already announced that they will offer this free.

Hoteliers will need to do their sums carefully, however. About 15% of telephone revenue for hotels is from people dialling up to the internet to download their e-mails, Wood says. Supplying free HSIA means that revenue will be lost.

But this is a decision faced only by hotels that invest in the hardware and software needed to access the internet. If the supplier funds the installation, call revenue will normally be shared between the hotel and the supplier, with the hotel typically receiving 20%.

Mark Beecroft, managing director of Virtual 9, which provides a range of online information services, has kept the same pricing policy for three years. "We went into a coffee shop in central London and bought a cappuccino. It was £3. We decided to charge £3 for 15 minutes, £5 for 30 minutes and £8 for an hour. We halved the prices after a year and we didn't see any change in volume, so we put them up again."

And neither is expensive cabling necessary to deliver online information to the guest TV screen, according to John Vernon, managing director of Techlive International. Techlive's approach is to install a bank of "client computers" - PC processors without screens or keyboards, each of which will serve about 10 bedrooms. These computers do the work of finding the information, news, film or internet service that the guest has chosen and putting it on his bedroom TV screen. They can also be interfaced to the hotel's property management system. The computer converts the information from digital to analogue format and transmits it to the bedroom TV set by traditional biaxial cable.

Using computers as servers like this, rather than having a separate processor in each room, means it's possible to replace the client computers every two years or so, as PC technology improves.

And, as always with technology, the potential is limitless. Once the Cat-5 cabling is installed, adding new applications becomes easier and more cost-effective. Panasonic, for example, has a security division which offers iris-recognition software: scan the guest's eye and a positive match will grant access to the bedroom, secure conference facilities or business centre. This may seem like a scene from Mission Impossible, but Panasonic is already in talks with hotels about it.

Halkin Guests can compile music album

This year's refurbishment is designed to keep the 41-bedroom Halkin in the upper strata of London's hotels, with an average room rate of about £300. Being privately owned, the hotel doesn't disclose what it has spent on the refurbishment, or on the cost of installing the e-TV Interactive service, which from this autumn will provide guests with news, TV, music and business applications, all via a broadband internet connection.

Guests have a choice of 28 TV channels, all transmitted digitally over the internet, and the top six suites have a higher-quality picture from Sony plasma screens.

Online movies are stored on the hotel's computer system and can be selected and played on demand rather than at scheduled times. Music can also be downloaded from the hotel system to the bedroom, giving guests a choice of 500 tracks from which they can compile their own "album".

High-speed internet access, says general manager Tom Orchard, was deemed "a must" by guests in an in-house questionnaire about the e-TV Interactive service. The first 10 minutes of internet access each day, enough to download the latest batch of e-mails, is free; after that guests pay, starting at £1.50 per 10-minute period, up to £20 for 24-hour access.

The Halkin has three sets of Cat-5 cabling throughout: one for sending data to TV screens; another for internet access; and one spare. So a company taking several rooms in the hotel for a conference could use this spare cable to set up its own network between bedrooms and meeting rooms. This service has yet to be used commercially, but rooms division manager Simon Wakefield believes this is an investment for the future.

Know the jargon

ADSL
Short for asymmetric digital subscriber line, a new technology that allows more data to be sent over existing copper telephone lines. Requires a special ADSL modem.

Broadband transmission
A type of data transmission in which a single medium (wire) can carry several channels at once. Cable TV, for example, uses broadband transmission.

Cat-5
Short for Category 5, Cat-5 cabling supports frequencies up to 100MHz and speeds up to 1,000Mbps. Computers hooked up to local-area networks are connected using Cat-5 cables.

Ethernet High-speed network, by which computers can be connected directly to the internet, without waiting for a dial-up connection.

ISDN
Integrated services digital network - an international communications standard for sending voice, video, and data over digital telephone lines or normal telephone wires. ISDN supports data transfer rates of 64Kbps (64,000 bits per second).

SDSL
Symmetric digital subscriber line - a technology that allows more data to be sent over existing copper telephone lines. SDSL supports data rates up to 3Mbps. Requires a special modem.

Wi-fi Short for wireless fidelity - a system that creates access points to the internet, rather like the network connections used by mobile phones. A user with a "Wi-Fi Certified" product can use any brand of access point. More than one access point may be needed, depending on layout of the building.