At The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Tech giant Google recently announced, Stadia. A streaming service that is predicted to rival Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo in the gaming market. It plans to offer 4k streaming to your Laptop, Mobile Phone, Tablet or TV – straight from Google’s Cloud.
With Microsoft also making moves into Cloud Gaming with Project xCloud, it seems that Gaming is going the way of movies and music and will soon be accessible from anywhere and on any device that you own.
How will this effect Hotel WiFi?
Google Stadia and Cloud Gaming will be revolutionary for those on the move. Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Prime allows users to stream their favourite movies and music straight to their hotel room and now guests have even more options, but how will cloud gaming work on a hotel network?
Google say that they will be able to deliver 4K 60fps streaming at 25mbps, which may be fine for most home WiFi networks, but is a considerable amount for a hotel network in 2019. Hotels will be required to expand the bandwidth that they give to guests for them to access all services that are part of their average day.
Offering a Premium WiFi package that gives the guests the speeds they need to access gaming content at a charge may be one way of offsetting the cost of implementing higher internet speeds to the hotel.
IoT Devices – The Browserless problem
Google Stadia requires Google’s own, WiFi connected, controller and a Chromecast to play on a TV. For travellers, this is great news as it means travelling light to game on the go. But what happens when these browser-less devices try to authenticate onto the hotel network?
In most hotel network setups, users are required to authenticate via a portal using their device, this is impossible for most IoT devices. For example, Google Chromecasts are added to a network using the user’s device as a bridge onto the WiFi. This would be impossible in most hotel setups as the wireless network would not allow the device to connect.
Airangel’s Guest WiFi Platform allows devices to be identified as a browser-less device. As IoT devices become more prevalent, perhaps such devices could be automatically identified as they are seen on the network, or a guest’s account may have a certain number of IoT devices that they can authenticate.
Airangel’s Personal Area Network solution would be the ideal way to solve issues around IoTs. When a guest checks in via the property management system, their WPA2 encrypted network is created. The guest can then connect all IoT devices just like home.
It’s clear that Cloud Gaming will revolutionise the way we think about Gaming and the bandwidth available to us. Hotels, and Hotel WiFi providers, must embrace these changes in order to ensure there is as little disruption as possible to the guest experience.
