Today’s broadband industry is a blazing race towards fibre connectivity. But it will take more than gigabit to close the digital divide, says Albert Farag, vice president of Europe and Global ISP, Linksys.
First, let’s assess the market. Big, incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) continue to dominate the broadband markets in the U.S and Europe. But if the last year is any indication, they’re no longer the only viable or even most attractive alternative in a growing number of areas.
ISP challengers lead the way
This year, smaller and independent ISP competitors or community-built broadband networks consistently proved to be the fastest service providers across the U.S. In Germany, one of the top three fibre deployers (behind France and the UK), over a quarter of homes can access a fibre connection, according to German broadband association BREKO. Of its 12.7 million fibre connections, 71% were built by an alternative network operator not Deutsche Telekom.
We’re seeing a similar phenomenon in the UK the rise of the ‘altnets’ or alternative ISPs, who grew fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) to over 5 million premises in 2021 a 111% increase which is set to double again this year. Incumbents, meanwhile, have moved slowly to install new networks or upgrade old copper ones. Even performance metrics specialist Ookla showed very recently that altnets offer the best speeds in places like London, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester.
In short, consumers are gaining more choice, with several ISPs and altnets even offering 1GB of broadband to consumers’ front doors, otherwise known as Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH). But raw speed is not enough today, as astutely pointed out recently by New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin, whose research found 40% of U.S customers are unsure of their home internet speeds. It’s a similar picture in the UK, where an Opinium survey found 42% of customers didn’t know their package speed.
Reliability, not speed, is the problem and Wi-Fi is the key
That same Opinium survey also shows 25% of UK customers regularly fail to receive the internet speeds they pay for. The stark takeaway here should be that for ISPs to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, they need to increase customer happiness not by focusing on top speeds but by delivering on reliability.
Even gigabit broadband doesn’t always deliver 1 Gbps, and WiFi is a large culprit. In fact, roughly 70% of calls to ISPs related to internet problems can be attributed to their Wi-Fi routers. If poor Wi-Fi connectivity inside the home hamstrings the advertised gigabit speed, millions of people and businesses lose out on the full benefits of fibre.
With 85% of UK premises set to receive fibre connectivity as part of Project Gigabit by the end of 2025, WiFi will prove a critical factor in whether people obtain these speeds. One of the reasons why altnets in the UK especially have done well is because of their strategy to embed high-performing WiFi routers into their broadband offerings to disrupt the market.
The perfect storm of online usage
Covid-19 brought about an irreversibly explosive uptick in demand for connectivity. The ways people work and consume content via the internet fundamentally differ now in both volume and frequency.
They no longer exclusively work near their router. They connect as many as thirty devices, shared between numerous people using bandwidth-intensive applications in different rooms. They host Zoom calls, stream 4K Netflix videos, download video games from platforms like Steam or the Microsoft Store (they even stream video games now to devices like the Steam Deck), upload multi-gig project files for work, listen to music on Spotify, etc.
And all of this often happens at the same time, causing connectivity to buckle under the weight of this intense usage. The answer here isn’t to users to reduce usage. That time is past. ISPs must adapt to the demands of today’s consumers, who might not necessarily be knowledgeable in the technical nuances of broadband connectivity but do know where the connection blackspots lie within their homes.
The Wi-Fi 6 benefit
To entice customers to stick around, ISPs must invest in advanced WiFi systems that support the best-quality connection to every corner of the house. Greater adoption of WiFi 6 is a big part of this.
WiFi 6 uses the same 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequency channels as WiFi 5 but brings multi-user multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MU-MIMO). In practice, this means less network congestion, more throughput, less latency, lower susceptibility to interference.
To contextualise this further, consider that homes today can see upwards of 30 simultaneously connected devices. Whereas WiFi 5 MU-MIMO tech only allows four devices to downlink data from one access point at the same time, WiFi 6 allows for considerably more devices, leading to lag-free access to online content around the house.
The transition from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6 is happening among a majority of ISPs who now want to own their customers’ journey as they seek to upgrade their WiFi to meet modern connectivity demands. And we’re already seeing a transition to the evolution of this, WiFi 6e (‘e’ meaning ‘extended’), which brings 6Ghz frequency within reach.
This means even faster speeds, lower latencies, and more bandwidth in general. Suddenly, the concept of watching 8K movies without buffering becomes far more tenable. As does transferring big project files for creative productivity applications like the Adobe suite, for example.
Battery life in devices is another area poised to improve, thanks to WiFi 6’s “target wake time” (TWT) feature, which conserves battery life by only connecting access points to WiFi when necessary. As the world increasingly becomes reliant on Internet of Things devices, this will no doubt be a big boon for reducing power consumption.
Standing out from the crowded market
In the grand scheme of things, topline broadband speeds have come a long way. But the key here is reliability. The difference between winners and losers in the ISP market will ultimately come down to who can marry the fastest advertised speed with the hardware that can support it. The components within the ecosystem need to support each other.
For this reason, ISPs must not lose sight of the importance of Wi-Fi. Moving to Wi-Fi 6, 6e, and 7 while critical, must also be supplemented by the use of advanced mesh systems that work in tandem to ensure optimal latency, bandwidth, and speed wherever consumers are connecting from inside their homes and no matter how many devices or people are connected. This is an opportunity that the altnets are taking an advantage of and is likely to gain them even more subscribers that are after a reliable, high-performance broadband experience.
The author is Albert Farag, vice president of Europe and Global ISP, Linksys.
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