We’ve read many articles this week about wireless offloading–802.11ac, 802.11u, in general, the future of wireless. This caught us reflecting on our clients’ wireless progressions.

We have a hotel client in San Francisco supporting wireless at their 16 story/120 room property. In the past year alone we have seen their guest wireless usage increase to more than double.

In 2011 we would see stats of 20-25 users passing 8GB of data. We now see 80 concurrently connected devices, passing 25-40GB of data a day. That’s practically a four fold increase of data in just a little over a year and these numbers are consistent across all our wireless hotel clients.

Our Take on Wireless Trending:
User capacity increases: mobile device driven
Bandwidth usage increases: video driven
Cell phone offloading: hasn’t occurred too much, this is the next trend
Coverage: everywhere. WiFi is not just in the lobby anymore
User expectations: system uptime, stability, ease of use, free
Customer expectations: coverage, stability, support WMM (data voice video),
Management features: simple dashboard view of system and usage stats.