2023.02.24 – Open Broadband News

How operators can secure value from a managed connected home  

The number of smart homes is forecast to grow and surpass the 350 million mark in 2023 with the newest technologies becoming a necessity. With more devices comes more complexity for home and SOHO networks and difficulties for users trying to get the most out of them. End users are also becoming more aware of the threat landscape that comes with more IoT devices. This puts operators in a unique position to gain new revenue streams through the management of the connected home.

By utilizing products and applications based on standardized, well-tested open-source solutions to launch value-added services, operators can realize this value and guarantee the satisfaction of their subscribers.  The Broadband Forum created the User Services Platform, or TR-369, for exactly this purpose.

Ultimately, the responsibility of these operators is to satisfy customer needs. One of the main challenges operators face in managing the connected home is the wide spectrum of devices it brings. Consumers expect their service providers to deliver on the concept of the smart home, whilst at the same time guaranteeing reliable, fast broadband services.

You can read the full blog by Jason Walls, Chair of the Broadband Forum Connected Home Council here.

Broadband must be accessible to all, peers told

Broadband should be made more accessible to people on benefits by encouraging them to use discounted deals designed for them, experts say.

They told the Lords Digital Committee’s digital exclusion hearings that cutting VAT on broadband could help people who struggle with “digital exclusion”.

Rocio Concha, of consumer group Which?, urged action to get more people on benefits using cheaper social tariffs. The UK Government has called on firms to raise awareness of the deals.

The high cost of living continued to put household budgets under strain, resulting in more people being “pushed” into digital exclusion, Chairwoman Baroness Stowell said in her opening remarks.

According to telecoms regulator Ofcom, more than 9.1 million UK households (32%) were having problems paying for their phone, broadband, Pay-TV and streaming bills when figures were compiled in October 2022, more than double the level of April 2021.

And 17% of households were cutting back on other spending, such as food and clothing, to afford communications services, more than four times the percentage doing so in June 2021.

Study: APAC telcos invest in homegrown OTTs

Asia-Pacific multichannel operators have become hybrid providers, with both traditional multichannel and virtual multichannel or Over-The-Top (OTT) subscription offerings launched in recent years, according to Kagan’s 2022 survey of OTT partnerships and virtual multichannel services.

The study also noted the increasing popularity of online video-streaming services and dwindling traditional Pay-TV subscriptions. Many telcos without their own Pay-TV services have also launched streaming video platforms to compete with both multichannel operators and third-party OTT providers.

As of November 2022, Kagan has identified 32 VMC or OTT services launched by telco or Pay-TV operators across 15 markets in Asia-Pacific.

The popularity of VMC indicates that viewers still want linear TV content when it is available but prefer more choices of streaming platforms. This trend gives telcos (including mobile operators) without Pay-TV businesses a chance to step into the streaming market, especially in regions where fixed broadband, multichannel and online streaming penetrations are relatively low, such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Fiber an increasingly affordable option for residential consumers – Cowen

Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) has established itself as a mainstay in the broadband market as services have become more affordable and accessible to the public, according to a recently published report from Cowen.

In a survey of over 1,200 consumers, Cowen found the average household income of a FTTH subscriber was around $83,000, compared to approximately $85,000 for those not subscribed to fiber. For the first time since Q4 2020, when Cowen began conducting its quarterly FTTH survey, income for FTTH subscribers is lower than income for non-FTTH subscribers.

The income shift is indicative of providers building out more fiber to the general population – rather than just wealthy neighborhoods – according to Cowen analysts Gregory Williams and Michael Elias.

In the report, Williams and Elias explained that in the past two decades, initial target markets for FTTH were “typically in wealthier zip codes that could command higher ARPU to justify the high build costs and otherwise challenging businesses case.”

“We contested that this trend would pivot going forward as FTTH builds target broader markets and more typical populations, and as FTTH plans offer lower rack rate pricing compared to that of Cable,” wrote Elias and Williams.

Broadband in paradise faces a special set of problems, island experts say

Peter Dresslar, a broadband and digital equity consultant for both the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and American Samoa, is of two minds.

While he knows that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is working as hard as they can to deliver accurate broadband maps to the country, some of the oversights in the mapping of the Pacific Territories have been darkly comic. Case in point: When ISPs reported their broadband records for American Samoa, they simply reported every single address on the territory’s map as receiving service, whether each did or not.

In reality, American Samoa has severe access challenges, but the broadband mapping in the Pacific Territories is only the first part of a larger story. When it comes to mapping, what’s at stake is money, more specifically the formula funding which will be added to baseline support that each state and territory will receive from the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program.

Dresslar is currently in the process of setting up a non-profit organization to formalize his consultancy with all of the Pacific Territories. While there are differentiators between them, there are also key similarities in this funding debacle, too.

“If challenges aren’t successful, Samoa will get $0. The other two [Pacific] territories will be similarly shut out from formula funding. These are the most expensive places [in the country] to buy internet, they’re notoriously bad in terms of reliability and connection speed,” Dresslar said.