For weary business travelers, hotels may just be a place to get a good night's rest. But for ITT Sheraton's John Herrera and Bill Oates, hotels are like microcosmic cities--right down to the copper wire that delivers telephone and cable service to the guest rooms in many of the chain's older facilities.

Like the rest of the world, Herrera, Sheraton's manager of telecommunications, and Oates, director of telecommunications and computer operations, have discovered that high end applications quickly choke on copper wire. But Herrera and Oates are determined not to let copper become a problem as they try to accommodate hotel guests' increasing hunger for bandwidth. Instead, they hope to turn the infrastructure into an asset using ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), an emerging modem technology designed to convert existing twisted-pair telephone lines into access paths for high-speed communications.

This fall, the hotel chain, a fully owned subsidiary of $ 6.6 billion ITT Corp., is launching a pilot project at a hotel in Hong Kong, where ADSL will be deployed to stream digital video and provide high-speed Internet access directly into guest rooms.

The approach certainly beats alternatives such as cable modems, which can't guarantee it, or switched Ethernet, which would require installing a complicated matrix of hubs and routers throughout the 19-story building, said Herrera, in Boston. Not only would switched Ethernet be more expensive, he said, it also would have more possible points of failure than the simple ADSL lines. The pilot will go live in mid-October 2007. Just one member in a family of DSL technology, ADSL can transmit between 6M bps and 7M bps downstream to the user. ADSL has less upstream capacity--just 640K bps--making the technology appealing to users that spend most of their time downloading large files, such as data stored on a Web site, or, in ITT Sheraton's case, digital video to a television in a hotel room.

Dozens of telecommunications providers are promising to deliver ADSL to business customers seeking higher-speed Internet access. But the majority of users may find themselves waiting to take advantage of ADSL and its DSL siblings--just like they waited for earlier high-speed technologies such as ISDN.

RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) have been so bogged down by regulatory issues that they have lagged in investing in DSL, experts said. The RBOCs are also holding off because they are still trying to recover from financial losses suffered after investing in ISDN, which failed to gain widespread acceptance. Meanwhile, despite deregulation rules, RBOCs have been slow to lease their copper lines to the emerging CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) and ISPs (Internet service providers) that want to provide DSL service.

Even when small providers get access to copper wire from the RBOCs, the lines aren't always clean enough to deliver quality ADSL. When [DSL technologies] are good, they are very, very good. But when they are bad, they are horrid.

Southworth has had more luck with SDSL (symmetrical DSL), a nonstandard version of ADSL that provides T-1 capacity both upstream and downstream. Although SDSL uses the same copper wire that caused problems with ADSL, SDSL is not as susceptible to trouble because it is a more conservative technology, explained Southworth. HarvardNet now offers SDSL service to business customers in the downtown Boston area.

HarvardNet's SDSL service was perfectly timed for Doug Herrick, manager of computer services at Charles River Associates Inc., a Boston consultancy specializing in economic litigation, finance and management.