Redundancy & The Future of WiFi

Lately it seems that venues (hotels, golf clubs, conference centers) are realizing the potential profitability of up-charging for internet access when organizations run events. This charge has always been there for sure, but lately it seems to have been ratcheted up about 300-400%. What’s worse is that most organizations aren’t aware that they may need it until they have signed an agreement, secured catering and basically invested too much to back away.

[callout_text]Looking into the future of how people will connect to the internet shows us that cellular providers like Sprint, AT&T and Verizon are key to saving costs.[/callout_text]Some electronic silent auction providers have avoided this cost by setting up local intranet sites where outside connections to the internet are not required. But this in many ways is a step backward because the world is constantly becoming more dependent on the web to conduct business. The new buzz word these days is “cloud computing” where software exists on remote servers and customers actually log into those servers to run everyday applications.’ The process of setting up a local intranet also severely limits the ability to open your auction to guests who do not attend your event.

With the knowledge of increased dependency on the internet comes the increased pricing from venues. They are aware that we need it and therefore can justify the massive increase in costs. What concerns us is that this can dramatically cut into the money retained by our non-profit clients which is ultimately the goal of what we do. Not only do we want to raise more money but we also want to cut cost to the organization.

Looking into the future of how people will connect to the internet shows us that cellular providers like Sprint, AT&T and Verizon are key to saving costs. AT&T for instance has spent billions over the past 12 months increasing their network speeds and availability, rivaling broadband internet providers like Comcast and Charter. This investment allows organizations like ClickBid to take advantage of this increased speed and reliability by using mobile hostposts to connect to the internet instead of relying on venue provided (at heavy cost) internet. Many of these venues brag of high speed and throughput but when you’re built on the premise that less is more, high bandwidth isn’t a major value add.

So for now, we use mobile hotspots as a backup to what is available on-site but the future is coming quickly and soon we need only mobile hotspots, which ultimately means lower costs for our clients.