The Gigabit Gap: Why fibre alone will not deliver the experience Broadband subscribers expect
By Metin Taskin, CEO & Co-Founder
We’ve spent years celebrating the fibre revolution, and rightly so. The infrastructure investment our industry has made is extraordinary. But as I look at the data we have compiled in our latest report, one truth stands out clearly: fibre gets you to the front door. What happens inside the home is a different challenge entirely.
It is very common for a home to have more than 30 devices connected to Wi-Fi simultaneously: gamers, remote workers, students streaming lectures, smart household devices running in the background and each with different needs. Each competing for performance and yet, most operators have had virtually no visibility into that connected home environment. We call it the “dark home” speeds are top notch, but experience issues happen and subscribers suffer and churn, and many operators can’t see the root cause of the in-home experience issues.
To understand the true scale of this churn caused by bad experience, we commissioned independent consumer research across the US, UK, and Japan, and cross-referenced findings with our own proprietary cloud platform data. The pattern is consistent across every market we studied, but the nuances matter.
Airties’ research shows broadband churn is primarily driven by poor in-home performance, not price: 47% of US churners and 49% of UK churners cited poor overall experience as the main reason for leaving, with 36% (US) and 41% (UK) highlighting specific quality-of-experience issues such as video freezes, slow browsing, and unreliable video calls.
Despite these frustrations, most customers do not switch to save money: 54% in the US and 60% in the UK pay the same or more after switching, while in Japan, around 25% of households are considering switching, with up to 60% of that churn potentially preventable through better quality and support. Overall, the findings underline that churn is largely avoidable and rooted in failure to deliver consistent, reliable home connectivity.
Start measuring and optimizing experience in the living room.
The shift the industry needs is this: Stop measuring experience at the cabinet and start measuring it in the living room. Our AI-Experience Management platform shows device-level insight and improvements and application-level prioritisation based on the needs of the unique household using agentic AI, so the connected home adapts to the needs of the users in real-time.
Subscriber retention is the new growth engine in a mature market, and customer experience is how you earn it. Airties provides insight and action in the home, and we see impressive results with many of our customers. Our platform optimizes the connectivity experience in real time based on the unique digital fingerprint of each connected home. To download the research, go here.
