ETelemetry Helps Hotels Halt Bandwidth Hogs

Networking technology firm eTelemetry released a new tool today to help hotels stop guests from overusing their free Internet bandwidth, and someday it might be a new means of hyperlocal advertising.

Called Notify, the system monitors Internet usage within a hotel and sends a message directly to a user’s browser to alert them if they’re reaching a predetermined threshold. The system doesn’t require a software download and appears as a clickable line on the browser page. While handy for monitoring broadband overhead, Notify might also be used as an advertising medium by the hotels to promote conventions or services, said Ermis Sfakiyanudis, CEO of eTelemetry.

“They will now have the ability to message and advertise in an unobtrusive way to share in the revenue that ordinarily they wouldn’t have access too,” he said. “It gives the advertisers the opportunity to microtarget, because you know exactly where the device is installed. It’s in a hotel in Manhattan for instance.”

But the devil is in the details, and it will probably be sometime before hotels could make use of third party ad networks to place the ads, and that’s only if advertisers become interested in hyperlocal targeting, according to Michael Greene, research associate with Jupiter Research.

“At this point limited to the hospitality sector and other close-linked systems, it doesn’t provide the scale that a lot of advertisers would be looking for,” he said.