High-Speed Hotels - Oceanic Cable installs CAIS Software Solutions' Internet access software at the Outrigger Waikoloa Beach Hotel & Resort in Hawaii - Company Business and Marketing

Business travelers, who, while anxious to reap the benefits of high-speed service on the road, are loathe to reconfigure existing computers to make it happen for fear of losing what's already there.

Understanding this, CAIS Software Solutions offer a seamless high-speed data connection for hotel guests, among other transient users.

"You go into any one of our properties and it does an automatic detect," said Steve Nye, the company's president. "While you're thinking about the service, our server has already interrogated the configuration of your laptop and made the determination of what it needs to conform to your laptop."

Time Warner Cable Inc.'s Oceanic Cable recently installed the CAIS software solution, which Nye calls an "ISP in a can," in the Outrigger Waikoloa Beach Hotel & Resort in Hawaii. The hotel can offer different service levels to guests, based on room location, among other things, Nye pointed out.

"The last piece that was very big for the Oceanic guys is when you go in with your laptop into a guest room and plug it into the service, it takes the guest through a series of screens," he said. This lets the hotel personalize the service and sell advertising.

The Ethernet-based software links the laptop via RJ45 cable into a cable modem and out to the cable plant. The connection, he said, is transparent to the user.

"When I talk about plug-'n'-play, that's what I mean," Nye emphasized. "It's a server-side configuration. Our experience says that if you hand a CD to a guest in a hotel and say you can use high-speed Internet access capability but you need to load this client onto your laptop, that strikes fear. You don't know what it's going to do and you don't know if it's ever going to go away."

CAIS, he said, goes away when the guest checks out.

While Oceanic and the Outrigger properties are the software firm's latest conquests, Nye said the CAIS is not strictly a cable product, or, for that matter, a hotel product. "We've found ourselves licensing it all over the world for DSL turn-ons, for cable, for regular Ethernet. It has application not only in hotels, but MDUs, campus dormitories, hospitals, small offices, anywhere somebody is looking to drag in a managed high-speed access capability," he said.

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