What about the Wi-Fi?
Two-thirds of homes might be able to receive gigabit broadband already, but is the Wi-Fi equipment in people’s homes – often provided by the ISPs themselves – capable of getting those speeds around the house?
That is becoming one of the industry’s biggest challenges, according to Zen Internet’s David Barber. “We’re in a world now where the last mile is faster than home Wi-Fi,” he said. “I can’t remember a time when that’s been the case previously, and I’ve been in telecom since 2000.”
“We can deliver an almost endless amount of bandwidth to your house,” added Barber. “But actually what people care about is can I get 25Mbits/sec in my conservatory where I’ve just put my new TV, and that all comes down to Wi-Fi. So it’s definitely the new frontier for service providers.”
Advances such as Wi-Fi 6 will help broadband providers deliver high speeds right around the home, although that of course relies on ISPs upgrading consumers’ routers as they upgrade the speeds. That’s not always a given. We’ve heard, for example, of Virgin Media customers on gigabit connections who’ve been told they can’t have the latest Wi-Fi 6 Hub because it doesn’t support Virgin’s older phone system.
Wi-Fi is also one of the broadband providers’ support headaches, because as Barber explains, every home has a unique layout that can affect signal strength, and something as trivial as a leaky microwave oven can knock out signals.
Wi-Fi’s inherent unpredictability means that many customers with ultrafast connections simply don’t want to rely on it. “A lot of the high bandwidth users will often have a wired network rather than Wi-Fi,” said Gigaclear’s Catherine Warren. “Wi-Fi could halve your bandwidth.”
Maybe the £1,500 Netgear is asking for its new Wi-Fi 6E mesh router ( see p68) isn’t such a bad deal after all.