Business travellers are increasingly relying on high-bandwidth applications, including Voice-over-IP (VoIP), video and audio while on the road, according to a UK customer survey by iBAHN.

Fast, secure broadband is still the key prerequisite for business travellers, with 87 per cent of iBAHN customers citing speed as the most important, followed by security at 55 per cent.

In addition, over half (53 per cent) of a sample of business travellers surveyed by iBAHN over a four-week period, said they regularly used a secure, high-bandwidth internet connection for applications requiring a fast and high volume data transmission.

Video was the most regularly used high bandwidth application at 16.3 per cent followed by audio at 9.31 per cent and VoIP at 7.8 per cent.

Graeme Powell, European managing director of iBAHN, comments: “Business travellers are now realising they can quickly and easily utilise high-bandwidth applications to enable a triple play service, including voice, video and data.

“Our customers are telling us that they want a greater variety of high-bandwidth applications to choose from while on the move, which means broadband capacity, delivered through a robust IP infrastructure, will be increasingly important to business travellers in 2006.”

The survey also revealed that most business travellers use the Internet at the expense of traditional travel-related perks, such as pampering or relaxing, by choice. Given a spare hour, business travellers are six times more likely to surf the Internet than go swimming, and twice as likely to surf the Internet than go to the gym.

62 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they used a virtual private network (VPN) connection to access the Internet from iBAHN’s partner hotels.  A VPN uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote users with secure Internet access to their company’s network.
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