Blog#4

CityCenter to Deliver Technologically Advanced Guestrooms in 2009, Hospitality Technology, Sept. 16, 2008

Summary: 

This article describes a super advanced guest room which will open in late 2009. By Cooperating with Control4 corporation, CityCenter develops a new level of personalized automation in guestrooms which will make the rooms debut the most advanced guestroom technology in the country, and become the benchmark for the hospitality industry. This smart room pays much attention to guests' in room experience. For example, once the guests entrance the room, it will recognize whether it is the first time they get in the room and welcome the guests by light, curtains, TV and so on. Guests can control all the utilities in the room by an integrated one-touch control and make changes of their preference. Keyless locks are adopted by the hotel to reduce key failure. 42-inch LCD HDTV can be connected to guests' laptop or other digital equipments as a "big-screen". In addition, this TV set could be a communication center especially working for displaying the messages of voice mails or package receipts and so forth. Besides, not only lighting, curtain opening, temperature could be visually controlled through TV, but also the wake up system could be combine in TV set. CityCenter will use fiber to offer on gigabit of bandwidth for the guests' Internet access and hotel operations. They also try to make the hotel "green" while introducing all kinds of technologies, for instance, energy and water saving, by indicating a suitable light level, room temperature, and automatically turning of the energy consuming equipments.

Reflection:

For Marriott in room wireless technology project, our team is looking for a method or we can say a central control device to integrate all kinds of wireless technologies in a guest room. So that guests can easily use all the in room technologies they need. The reason we think about this is because sometimes even there are full of advanced technologies in the guest room, but if guests do not know how to use them or do not use them at all because of the inconvenience of controlling, the guests' satisfaction falls down. Just imagine, if you pay 10 minutes try to find out how to turn on the light or how to adapt the light level but end it by failure, do you think there is any possibility that you will still feel satisfied of the hotel? So in my opinion, the article presents a right direction of developing a future guest room. What's more, the author emphasizes more at the automation of those technologies in a guest room, so called smart room. With the smart enough start of the in room experience, and the integrated control center--TV, and the comfortable and abundant experience the advanced technologies, I am sure that this kind of guest room will lead the the hospitality industry to a new milestone.

URL:

http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=9B8654F972FB45F3B5C8EF0A22C8E10E

Blog#3

Vasquez, Leonard (2008), Meet High Speed Internet Demands, Hospitality Technology, Sept. 30th, 2008

URL:http://www.htmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=MultiPublishing&mod=PublishingTitles&mid=3E19674330734FF1BBDA3D67B50C82F1&tier=4&id=2E4B401F4A43439D9BCF18D01C45FCBD

Summary: 

Nowadays, guests now require not only Internet but high speed Internet when they stay in a hotel. If the speed of Internet is too slow, that would bring guests bad experience of the whole hotel. So how to make sure that we offer guests a high-quality Internet experience is one of the most important things among the hotel operation. The first of the concerns associated with hotel bandwidth is the ability to keep up with the growing bandwidth demands that will satisfy guests’ Internet experience. Besides operators should make sure that they have enough bandwidth to support new applications and services and have a solution which is easy to manage to find out who and what is using up the bandwidth in the hotel.  It can be concluded to three words: reliability, knowledge, and management. The connection redundancy which will ensure guests always connect to Internet, the aggregation which can combine the bandwidth of the hotel’s multiple low cost Internet circuits to increase Internet speed, and AUP and landing page backup which ensures the hotel brand continues to be presented to the guest even when the HSIA gateway fails, are used to ensure reliability. Knowledge is also important to the Internet speed management. With knowledge operators can know who and what application is occupying the bandwidth so as to keep enough bandwidth. And the proactive monitoring and alerting can notify the operator automatically the problem of the devices in the guestroom before a guest notices that. With the p2p management operators are able to stop some applications or limit the amount of bandwidth they can use, and also shape an enough bandwidth for those critical administrative applications. Operators can also use VPN to make sure that the administrative applications and data are traversing safely. 

Reflection:

The author has good opinion of managing Internet bandwidth in a hotel. I totally agree that the bad Internet experience would influence guests' hotel experience. With the development of in-building technology,  the requirements of guests becomes more and more, especially for those are already well achieved in hotels like minibars, heat, internet and so on. The author advices many good methods to manage the bandwidth so that hotel or restaurant operators are able to provide enough high speed Internet to guests. In my opinion, all of the solutions are great. What impresses me most is aggregation. It is so creative to combine many existing low speed internet to make a related high speed internet, which could save lots of money. This reminds  me that day when we visited UD IT center, the man there told us they use different connector to achieve the speed of one Gbps with Cat 5, which also saves a lot of money for the university.  Also the bandwidth management is very interesting. Although it sounds good to know the occupancy of the bandwidth of every application and be alerted of the problems of the devices in guest rooms in advance, the author does not tell us what exactly the software or application is used to do the management, either for the traffic shaping.