Marriott was an early partner and investor (it still holds a minority equity position), but it has only about half of the STSN portfolio, unlike in the 1998-2001 period when virtually all STSN rooms were in Marriott properties.

Jones said STSN sees a "total addressable market" of about 20,000 properties domestically and about 15,000 in foreign countries. STSN competes with hardware manufacturers, systems integrators and other total service providers like itself that integrate software and hardware on-site and then form long-term relationships with the property and with the ownership group of the property to deliver services to meet their needs.

"Another twist that makes us a little different is that we are very large in our ability and very scalable in our operations, so we can work with a very large ownership group that has the largest property you could imagine as well as an economy 'box' somewhere," Jones said. "We can deploy the solution that meets the need relative to the property."

But that scalability works hand-in-hand with security as a major STSN selling point. Hotels turning to cheap service providers likely will get burned. "We are a premium-grade offering, . . . but they recognize the value of the term of the contract far outweighs the cost," he said. "What we're targeting now is that value proposition."

Free Internet access is becoming more pervasive, but high service and security levels will always be attractive, he said.

"We have a very enterprise-class security culture that manifests itself not only in our technology but our business practices, where we believe that is sacred," he said. "Everybody says security is important, and I think people are very careful to say if they're secure or not."

He makes his point by reading from a disclaimer card found in a hotel room. It warns that the hotel is not responsible for any damage to the computer or its data or for the security of Internet transmissions.

"We see this out in the industry regularly, these disclaimers. The hotel industry is trying to say, 'Caveat emptor' — you're basically on your own. We don't think that's acceptable," he said.