Meeting internet – price estimator and report

Suppose you’re planning a three day conference for 500 attendees, and you need to order wifi in the meeting space. In the U.S. that could cost you between $6,646 and $80,040. Or it could be free.

My meeting planner friends have shared stories for a long time about inconsistent internet pricing. I work for an AV production company, and while we don’t provide wifi, we do see hotel AV companies use wifi pricing as a hostage in contract negotiation with clients.

I wasn’t aware of any formal look at this subject, so I gathered data from my colleagues in the industry and wrote up this report. I also created a price estimator below.

The short version

If you need internet, the process for determining the price seems opaque and arbitrary. You should absolutely:

• Get pricing in writing.
• Get that price before signing a contract with the venue.
• Negotiate down, with a clear conscience, whatever initial price you receive. (or ask for it complimentary)
• If you have difficulty negotiating, go to the hotel salesperson rather than an on-site third party salesperson.

What’s the data?

• You’ll need between .08 and .23 Mbps per person, but more is better.
• The median price per day for 1 Mbps is around $111.
• For comparison, the typical price per day for 1 Mbps of business class internet in an office is less than a penny. ($0.0061)

Event Wifi Price Estimator

Negotiation

We’re all aware businesses exist to make a profit. I can make coffee much cheaper at home than if I go to Starbucks. I’m paying for convenience, and for an experience. 

That said, hotels can charge quite a lot for a gallon of coffee. And a prudent conference director will be looking at their overall investment when choosing a venue. I’m sharing this so planners can be armed with knowledge about typical internet pricing and that hard costs for venues are minimal.

What about installation and service? Don’t hotels have to pay to install routers and cabling and so on? Yes, and of course I don’t have access to those numbers. I can tell you that when I worked in luxury hotels (~10 years) I never saw any work done on wifi routers. But let’s say the cost of installation and service was $100k, and it needed to be done every 5 years. The cost of depreciation for a month would be $1,666. It would be $54 a day. Those aren’t verified numbers, I only say this to highlight that even taking installation into account you shouldn’t feel bad for shrewdly negotiating.

In 2026 in the United States, many hotels have a third party AV company which is paying the hotel a commission (about 50%) to have an office on-site and be the preferred audio-visual vendor. Often that same company is the one selling internet service. 

In an ideal world a planner will have received a written internet price before even signing a contract at the hotel. But if the contract is already signed and you receive what you feel is a high quote, I would go to your hotel salesperson, rather than the audio-visual company. From my time working for “in-house AV”, I know that the hotel is their top priority customer. The AV contact will be more receptive to a hotel salesperson who feels the client relationship is in jeopardy.

More data please

I collected 50 instances of internet pricing, but would love to have more. I’m interested in patterns related to the location of the venue, size of the group, hotel brand or which entity is billing for the internet. I’d need a bigger set of data for that. If you’d like to help, please share info here.

How much internet do I need?

Internet speed is measured in megabits per second (Mbps). Encore is a big AV vendor that also sells internet services. They have a website where you can enter your number of attendees and it will estimate how many Mbps you need. As of January 2026 they suggest you need around .08 Mbps per person for “light” usage, .15 Mbps for “moderate” and .23 for “heavy” usage. (In practice even if you only needed wifi for one person you wouldn’t get less than 2-6 Mbps)

There are third party companies like Tradeshow Internet and Made by Wifi which will provide your own wifi network separate from the venue. I saw recommendations from them ranging from .1 Mbps to 5 Mbps. 

For a little context, home ISPs sell packages of 100, 300 and 1,000 Mbps (1 Gbps or gig) for one household. Business class service as of this writing starts around 300 and goes up past 2 gigs.

How much does it cost?

The median price for a Mbps per day from the quotes I collected was $111.98. The average price was $151.95. Those median/average figures do not include cases of complimentary wifi.

The high end was about $232 per Mbps per day, and besides “free”, the low end was around $55 per Mbps per day.

I heard from a number of meeting managers who don’t pay anything for wifi in their event space, both small board meeting types and large conferences. I’m particularly interested to hear from those who have negotiated complimentary services, please feel welcome to share data using the form I mentioned.

I mentioned business class internet service earlier – I looked up pricing from the five largest cities in the United States, for three ISPs in each city. (As you can imagine often the same ISP, for example Comcast and AT&T were data points in three of those cities) The median cost for a Mbps per day is $0.0061, and the average is $0.0064. Of course ISPs don’t sell by the day, they sell by the month, which would be a median of $0.18 for one Mbps.

Why is pricing so hard to compare?

Have you ever been to an arcade where you buy tokens to play the games? And then you get tickets from the game which you can trade for prizes? By design, it’s tricky to translate cash to tokens to tickets to prizes and determine what something really costs.

Often planners are asking for and being told numbers in different formats for internet pricing – how many attendees, how many devices, how many Mbps. This was reflected in the quotes I collected from planners, and it helps to obscure how arbitrary the price is.

Another factor is that regardless of how many megabits per second it says on the order, I’ve seen occasions where the client receives all of the bandwidth available in the meeting space (100 Mbps+). The person selling internet service has an incentive to generate as much revenue as possible. The technicians who are supporting the event have an incentive to reduce headaches. 

If they give the client only 2 Mbps and attendees start complaining that the internet isn’t working, the technician is the one who has to deal with it. So if some other group isn’t also in the building, it’s not unusual for an event to get an upgrade to all the bandwidth available. (This is more likely to be true at a small/medium sized hotel, and not at larger properties or a tier 1 convention center.) When this happens, it can be misleading for future orders. “We only ordered 2 Mbps at the last event and it worked great.”