New Survey Claims 50 Percent of Broadband ISPs to Adopt WiFi 7 Within 12 Months

A new survey of 90 global internet providers, which was conducted by Heavy Reading (Omdia), in collaboration with eero (Amazon) and Qualcomm Technologies, claims that more than 50% of ISPs have already deployed or expect to deploy WiFi 7 based service plans within 12 months. Part of this is to support the roll-out of multi-gigabit speed packages, said to be growing at 20.5% a year (CAGR).

In terms of what the ISPs currently support. A combined 63% of global service providers indicate Wi-Fi 5 is no longer supported or will only be for up to 2 years. Of all respondents, 16% will continue support for “3–4 years” and 22% “up to 5 years.” By comparison, 38% of respondents expect to support Wi-Fi 6 for up to 2 years.

Faster broadband speeds (61%) are said to remain the top driver for Wi-Fi upgrades to newer technologies like WiFi 7, with “Quality of experience/user experience” (48%) and “lower latency” (47%) following close behind. Not to mention that the most frequently reported customer concern related to ISP supplied Wi-Fi kit is “poor indoor coverage/dead zones” – 61% of respondents commonly recommend using a multi-device wireless architecture (based on a combined group recommending Wi-Fi extenders (33%) and mesh systems (28%)).

Additional Survey Highlights

➤ A combined group of 66% of respondents for business connectivity and 59% for consumer use consider Tri-band frequency support in Wi-Fi 7 (2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz) to be extremely important or important for their connectivity offerings.

➤ 94% of ISPs currently offer, or plan to deploy, multi-link operation (MLO) – a key performance boosting feature of WiFi 7.

➤ Security and safety features (67%) are the top software priority for service providers when selecting Wi-Fi equipment. Device and real-time service optimization (54%), internet backup (29%), and the ability to sell value-added services, including third-party subscriptions (28%), follow behind.

➤ Automated troubleshooting (28%) and network optimisation (26%) are the top use cases for AI-based Wi-Fi network management. Predictive management (16%) and configuration management (15%) follow behind.

The catch in all of this is that Wi-Fi 7 is still more of a premium market feature, with most ISPs maintaining a mixed estate of Wi-Fi generations across their installed base. However, vendors are starting to introduce more affordable, entry-level products to make this technology more accessible, just as they always do.

The full Wi-Fi 7 Operator Survey can be accessed via the ISPA’s website (here), although we would have preferred to see the results for a survey that only focused on UK based broadband providers. Naturally eero also has a vested interest in plugging adoption of the latest router technologies.