Kyle
We travel an awful lot. Most of our readers know that we’re on a sneaker strapped, nationwide startup road trip, which means we stay in the car a lot, but in hotels a lot too. The biggest challenge in hotels isn’t about bedding, towels, or even what’s on tv. We book rooms based on wifi, availability and pricing. The problem is even when you do a preliminary check on a hotels wifi it’s still slow as molasses and typically a horrible experience.
Outside of bringing our own wifi (which we do as backup) there hasn’t been much change since hotels started offering wifi. Free or not most hotels have less than subpar wifi.
Well a Rochester startup called Wi3 is doing something about that.
We first met Wi3 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in January. They were demoing their innovation award winning WiPNET product. As you can see from the video above, WiPNET in home allows the user to set up access points with the bulk of the load making it from point a to point b over coax. This is ultimately the same thing that cable internet providers are doing from the node to your home.
WiPNET makes sure you have a clear wifi access point with very little (if no) latency or loss of signal from the entry point to the end user. Pretty magical stuff.
Well now they’ve announced that they are offering their product to the hospitality industry (hotels)
WiPNET allows many devices to simultaneously access HD and rich media digital Web content on the same hardwired network using existing coax cable infrastructure and a hardwired access point in every guestroom. This innovative application of MoCA technology eliminates the problem of network buffering caused when several devices are accessing the Web within the same environment. It also simplifies network management and oversight, even allowing hotel owners to create tiered-access services as an additional profit center.
“Serving hotel guestrooms or commercial properties with just one WiFi router or a few WiFi repeaters across a property does not meet the needs and demands of the ever increasing WiFi enabled mobile consumer,” said Wi3 CEO Bill Thompson. “Wi3’s patented in-wall Ethernet and WiFi products enable properties that have coax connections to convert every room or space into a full-bandwidth dedicated access point to satisfy even the most heavy of users, thus simplifying and eliminating today’s singular WiFi router approach.”
Now in a nutshell, every hotel guest in every room will have their own dedicated wifi access point and won’t overload the Belkin or Linksys routers that are typically not so strategically placed in hotels.
Linkage:
More on Wi3 and WiPNET here
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