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Three Mistakes Hotels Are Making with Wi-Fi
Posted: 09/18/2023

Wi-Fi is now like the foundation for your hotel: if it’s not solid, it can jeopardize everything.
Your HSIA network has to deliver the performance and experience your guests demand; Wi-Fi has evolved from being an amenity to a necessity and key driver of guest satisfaction.
In the converged world, all your systems for business operations depend on a solid and secure Wi-Fi network. Without it, nothing else works properly—your staff and systems will struggle, and you will waste precious time, money, and resources trying to recover.
Here are three things you may be doing that put you and your Wi-Fi network at risk, and what you should do instead.

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Definitely Doug 9/15/23: Experience Matters!
Posted: 09/15/2023

Hotels are usually the first thing a traveler books within a destination. And hotels usually know that destination better than anyone else (or any website) a guest might consult. But are hotels connecting the dots?

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Definitely Doug 8/25/23: Check It Off the List!
Posted: 08/25/2023

This week I will cover software that goes under various descriptions, including quality assurance, audit, and checklist management. It includes anything that involves a standard list of things that someone needs to perform or verify. In hospitality, this is still an emerging field, but is growing very rapidly.

Between 2020-2022, traveler adoptions fluctuated drastically due to the lockdowns, the impact of the variants, and the vaccination schedule. As the pandemic is behind us and people start to travel in 2023, one question is on every practitioner’s mind: What are the traveler’s current expectations and preferences in the post-pandemic world?

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Definitely Doug 8/11/23: Charge Me Up!
Posted: 08/11/2023

Few things make travelers more anxious than a mobile phone with a low battery. For years, hotels have tried to play catch-up with evolving mobile device charging standards, and many seem to have given up. Guests can sometimes find desktop or bedside USB ports (dated but still relevant charging standard), but most hotels offer only an electrical outlet, and too many times it is in the most difficult-to-reach location possible. Others have made expensive decisions to install USB ports on bedside tables or work desks, only to find them out of date when the standards changed – or broken by frequent use.

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Nomadix vs. Blueprint RF Update: The Nomadix Patent Case Explained

11/11/2015

by Trevor Warner

For more than a year a fight has been brewing between Blueprint RF and Nomadix over Internet gateway patents. As the lawsuit begins to find clarity there are two basic functions that remain in dispute, the captive-portal or login page and PMS-billing connection fees to guestrooms.

While the case remains pending before a federal judge in California, we found out that Blueprint RF filed for Inter Partes Review (IPR) of the captive-portal patents with the U.S. Patent Office. Blueprint RF submitted over 40 pieces of the evidence to the patent office, which has the power to invalidate the patents in question. The IPR process takes approximately 18 months and historically has found roughly 80 percent of the patents submitted for review to be invalid.

One of the most interesting aspects of the court case surrounds who was first to develop portal page redirection. Blueprint RF contends that Nomadix filed its patent applications nearly a year after the technology was implemented by competitor, the Connect Group, and many months after it was demonstrated at the 1998 HITEC.

Evidence shows that Nomadix filed its first provisional patent application in December 1998 and claims to have had portal page redirection working in March 1999. Blueprint RF asserts that the Connect Group had portal page redirection working in January 1998 and in commercial service by March 1998, followed by ATCOM with its IPORT server in July 1998.

Nomadix’s case against Blueprint’s claims relies on an expert opinion saying that a comment in the Connect Group source code indicates that the Connect Group’s portal page redirection was not actually working until May 1999, two months after Nomadix had its “captive portal” working. With respect to IPORT, Nomadix contends that the evidence should be ignored because the documentation is unclear.

Blueprint RF has submitted testimony from Michael Slemmer, the primary author of the Connect Group software, who explained that the May 1999 date refers to the date he left the company and saved the code into a special storage facility, not when he wrote the portal page redirection code. Slemmer testified that portal page redirection was working in January 1998 and in commercial service in March 1998 at the San Jose Hilton followed by other hotels.

Slemmer’s testimony is upheld by three witnesses including John Gengarella, the hotel’s general manager and Connect Group investor, who originally had the idea of redirecting hotel guests to a payment page as a financially viable way to bring high-speed Internet into the hotel. Charles Katz, the Connect Group’s chief financial officer, testified that he was present at the successful demonstration of the technology at the June 1998 HITEC. Stanford University programmer Andrew Roper also testified that portal page redirection was working when he interned with the Connect Group during the summer of 1998.

Slemmer, Gengarella and Katz all emphasized that the successful demonstration of portal page redirection in June 1998 led to the multi-million purchase of the Connect Group by LodgeNet, which was announced at the 1998 HITEC. That testimony is supported by press coverage in June 1998, an invention disclosure written by Slemmer in September 1998, a patent application filed in November 1998, and a sale covering 11,800 rooms in 120 Wingate Inns locations signed in January 1999—all before Nomadix claims to have first come up with the idea.

On the ATCOM side, Blueprint RF presented Keith Olson, the primary author of the IPORT software. He testified that ATCOM was so impressed with the Connect Group gateway at the June 1998 HITEC conference that they immediately set out to come up with their own version. The IPORT “server only” version 2.0 was released a month later in July 1998 followed by IPORT Central Office in October 1998. Olson’s testimony is backed up by another IPORT programmer who said that IPORT portal page redirection was already developed and on sale when he started working for ATCOM in November 1998. That testimony is supported by a wealth of press coverage, two “White Papers” published on the IPORT website in November 1998, and the IPORT User’s Manual dated April 1999.

Blueprint RF contends that they have found the “smoking gun” to free the industry of these patents and open the way for new development and innovation. It’s up to the federal court and the patent office to make the final decision.

Source:

http://blueprintrf.com/repository/

Lodgenet Acquires Connect Group

Internet Access for the Road Warrior Easier Than Ever, IPORT™ Version 2.0 Released