Not to pick on Marriott, but if you travel, you know that hotel Internet access can be spotty and troublesome. Unexpected guest demand for video bandwidth turns out to be an issue. Neil Schubert, Marriott International VP says the Courtyard segment ran ads announcing "free access" and showing a guest using that connection for video telephony. Courtyard then experienced a four-fold increase in bandwidth consumption.
“This ad came out before we knew about it,” Schubert says. So why was this a problem? Courtyard typically was allocating a single Digital Subscriber Line circuit for 160 customers. "It didn’t work real well at first,” Schubert says.
Slingbox was a factor, apparently. It seems more and more travelers are toting their Slingboxes around with them. So the next time you see a forecast for at-home video consumption (such as this one from Telecom Futures originally created in 2001), remember that users consuming that bandwidth at home are going to keep some of the same behaviors when they are not at home. We're going to need more bandwidth, at more locations, than just office and home.
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