Patent Awarded to iBAHN for Revenue-Enhancing Technology for Hospitality Industry

Salt Lake City | iBAHN, the worldwide leader in digital entertainment and Internet solutions for the hospitality and meeting industries, announced today that the United States Patent Office has awarded the company a patent for its development of proprietary software tools that detect multiple users of a network access node. The technology has been in use by iBAHN and its hotel partners for approximately four years, and now has the protection of a patent.

“Hoteliers put forth an enormous effort to provide both meeting planners and meeting attendees with an environment that fosters proactive meetings,” noted Gregory G. Hodges, iBAHN’s president. “As the demands in the meeting space become increasingly complex, we will continue to leverage our proprietary technology and expertise in more than 10 million square feet of meeting space around the world. Our objective is to not only meet the expectations of meeting planners, but also to preserve a critical revenue stream for our hotel partners.”

The patent protects the design and development of technology that detects situations in which a person or persons pay for one connection to a network that is supporting a meeting or conference, but then use a device to allow others, undetected, to share the Internet connection. This can cause hotels to lose conference services revenue based on a per-user plan. Because iBAHN built and owns its secure end-to-end managed network, it is able to have immediate visibility into such activities, thereby providing for the institution of rapid corrective actions.

Hotels often experience bandwidth usage peaks that jeopardize the guest user experience. The solution is to increase bandwidth to the property but this means additional monthly expense. To the extent that bandwidth theft plays a part in usage peaks, the newly patented process would help hotels recover revenue that could more than pay for the monthly cost of increased bandwidth.