October 25, 2023 – Most broadband service providers plan to introduce technology which automatically directs greater bandwidth and lower latency to the services being used by customers, says a new report.
The research – published today by Omdia in conjunction with The Broadband Forum and sponsored by Axiros, CommScope, F-Secure, Friendly Technologies, Incognito Software Systems Inc., and Nokia – reveals nearly three quarters (72%) of telcos interviewed have identified broadband application prioritization as a key focus. This is to meet the growing demands of high-bandwidth applications (like video streaming or gaming) and to deliver improved Quality of Experience (QoE) for homes and businesses.
"In the future, delivering a great broadband experience will be less about speed and more about providing value-added and tailored services to the end customer," Broadband Forum Vice President Strategic Marketing and Business Development Craig Thomas said. "Open standards can deliver the sort of service-aware and application-appropriate network capabilities that can help providers improve their products and provide customers with greater user experience."
While many broadband service providers are already offering value-added services related to basic connectivity, over the next 12 months and beyond, service providers said they will look to offer additional premium services beyond those related to the connection itself. This includes home security, working from home packages, energy management, and IoT enablement through Matter. Home broadband, Wi-Fi speed and reliability guarantees, and speed testing/diagnostics were among the most popular value-added services telcos plan to offer, with more than 60% of respondents stating they had already deployed these. Managed Wi-Fi, premium customer support, voice assistants, and cybersecurity also feature heavily in the responses.
Another key finding was that Broadband Forum's User Services Platform (USP) open industry standard remains critical in the delivery of new value-added services. 85% of respondents to the survey said they had already deployed USP or planned to within the next 6-18 months. USP was developed to help deploy, implement, and manage all aspects of the smart home. The data model, architecture, and communications protocol enable broadband service provider remote management of devices in the home network including the Wi-Fi home gateway, independent of the vendor that manufactured the device.
Managed Wi-Fi (58% of respondents) led the way for the question of which value-added services operators plan to use USP for. Other popular services included premium customer support, cybersecurity, voice assistants, and energy management.
All respondents agreed that reduced fragmentation and proprietary technology at the chipset, CPE, and software platform level would drive greater innovation and lead to faster onboarding of value-added services.
"A key barrier of time to market for new services from network operators has been the integration time with devices and platforms that may use different vendors and proprietary technologies," Omdia Research Director – Service Provider Consumer Michael Philpott said. "Some network operators may opt for a 'best of breed' strategy to develop their own, bespoke, in-home platform to take full control over the ecosystem they create and give them the best chance of differentiation in the market. Adopting a fully open standards model at both the lower and higher layers can ensure that both applications and software, or hardware and chipsets can be quickly and efficiently swapped out at any time without the need for further integration work."
To read the full Omdia and Broadband Forum report, The Future of the Connected Home: The Rise of Home Applications, download here.
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