Though regulators and advocates often focus mostly on availability (coverage) and quality (speed), consumers often prioritize value, preferring a “good enough for my needs” approach where recurring price might be more important than raw performance.
And that might explain the demand for fixed wireless services in many markets, where FWA offers enough speed at lower prices than services provided by telco digital subscriber line, telco fiber-to-home or cable TV home broadband.
In the U.S. market, FWA appears to have dented demand for cable services, in particular.
Though most consumers would likely have a hard time quantifying how much speed their households require, it remains true that beyond a fairly low level of access speed, users gain very little, in terms of performance (quality of experience) when shifting to services offering speeds faster than about 25 Mbps per user in the downstream.
To be sure, the percentage of U.S. customers buying gigabit or multi-gigabit services has steadily increased since 2021, while the percentage of customers buying service at speeds below 50 Mbps has dropped.
But it might be worth noting that about 25 percent of the home broadband market continues to buy services at the lower end (200 Mbps or less) of home broadband speeds sold by ISPs. That suggests the market opportunity for FWA is about a quarter of the market, so long as speeds top out around 200 Mbps.
At the moment, FWA could address more than half the U.S. market if it were upgraded to offer speeds up to 400 Mbps.
We might well assume that buyers of gigabit-speed services are mostly driven by service “quality” as measured by downstream speed, upstream speed, unlimited data usage and network reliability. That might broadly account for up to 30 percent of the market.
This segment includes gamers, streamers, professionals with high bandwidth needs and larger families.
In contrast, perhaps up to 30 percent of customers seem to buy the most affordable option, including students, budget-conscious families, or those with limited online activity. By definition this segment is most price conscious, even if that means lower speeds.
The broad middle of the market might represent up to 40 percent of customers who balance price and features. This segment prefers “good enough” speeds, sufficient data allowances, and reliable service, at a reasonable cost, somewhere between the most-expensive and most-affordable tiers of service.
In many cases, FWA could appeal to both “balanced value” and “price-driven” segments of the market, in particular for single-person households or dual-person households with lower usage.
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