Today, as we become accustomed to life in the internet age, Amsterdam is again attracting business visitors from around the globe with its showcasing of a new kind of connectivity: a high-bandwidth, fibre-to-the-premises internet connection.
According to the Moevenpick hotel’s IT manager, Koen van den Berge, having fibre internet means it’s possible to juggle the differing internet requirements of guests and conference visitors – especially in a moderately large hotel, where guests are getting increasingly used to high-speed broadband.
“For Holland dimensions, we’re quite a big hotel with 408 rooms and quite a large conference area,” van den Berge explains. “Over the past three years since I joined the company, I have seen an increase in bandwidth consumption for conferences – not only for videoconferencing but also high-definition video streaming. Three years ago that was rare; now it’s common.”
The hotel first installed fibre internet three years ago – after Amsterdam began building a fibre-to-the-premises internet infrastructure in 2006. Then, a year ago, it upgraded to a 60Mbps upstream, 60Mbps downstream service offered by DSD Business Internet, van den Berge says.
“We use that on two different fibre lines,” he explains. “One for guest internet - and one for meetings and bandwidth-consuming operations.”
But having the fibre connection means the hotel has the “firepower” it needs to handle the internet demands of major events, such as meetings and conferences. And that capability came in particularly useful the day hundreds of surgeons came to town.
“We had a conference with 400 surgeons in-house – and we showed high-definition, live surgery that was taking place in two hospitals in Holland at the same time,” he says. “By the second fibre line, we transported the signal to a satellite conference in Brussels, where a cardiology conference took place at the same time.”
The hotel wasn’t physically big enough to host both conferences, explains van den Berge – but it was still able to play a critical role thanks to its technological capability. And it worked particularly well as the first conference operated mostly in Dutch and English, and the second mostly in French.
“For our hotel, this was interesting,” he explains. “We couldn’t do it before with our normal SDSL business lines.
“This is the future,” he adds. “We’re getting quite a lot of good comments about it. It’s new, but we’re getting there.”
The fibre connection at Hotel Moevenpick is, of course, part of a wider effort by Amsterdam’s authorities to connect fibre internet to 40,000 businesses and homes – via a public-private umbrella company, Glasvezel Amsterdam.
“They’re putting fibre in every square metre [of the city],” jokes van den Berge. “If you’re a consumer living close to the hotel, they have apartments where you can rent a fibre to the home – a 100Mb up, 100Mb down line. Even for us that’s fairly progressive.
“I read somewhere that Holland is the most bandwidth-consuming country on the planet. Per civilian, we’re using more bandwidth.”
In a world of ever increasing expectations, having the line gives flexibility, van den Berge explains. “You have an enormous amount of bandwidth that’s reliable and gets the job done – no stress.”