Reliability of broadband service is the single most important characteristic to consumers and definitely more important than speed, according to a new survey from the Fiber Broadband Assocation.
A full 78% of respondents said that the most important aspect of broadband was that it be reliable, with few service interruptions. Having fast download speed was rated the second most important characteristic, at 64% of respondents, followed closely by not having data caps (63%) and upload speeds (61%).
Reliability was also a factor in customer satisfaction with their service provider. The survey asked respondents to rate aspects of their customer experience and while trust that a provider keeps its promises was the highest-rated factor (57% of respondents), service reliability was the second most commonly cited factor (42%). Performance characteristics came in third (38% of respondents).
The report is based largely on data from surveys of 3,200 U.S. consumers collected in May of this year, as well as 1,100 surveys of Canadian consumers; the data was collected by RVA, which has conducted broadband surveys for the Fiber Broadband Association since 2006.
Among the other highlights:
-Consumers reported spending 5.9 hours online at home each day. About a quarter of people said that just one person was online at a time, 37% said two people were online simultaneously and another 21% said that three people were online at the same time in their household.
-The single most important factor in satisfaction with customer service was having real people to talk to and reasonable wait times to do so.
-Overall, 90% of respondents rated broadband as either important or very important, particularly those who were in high-income households, were longtime broadband users (meaning they’d had broadband service for at least a decade) and were middle-aged (35-54).
-Consumers also considered high-quality broadband service to be important to the desirability of a community. Low crime and affordability of housing/cost of living were the only aspects ranked higher than broadband by the survey respondents.
-Recent broadband adopters tended to be lower-income. The survey found that 57% of respondents who had adopted broadband within the past four years had incomes below $40,000; 63% of recent adopters were Caucasian. Nearly 40% of recent adopters said that broadband service had helped them find a new job opportunity.
-Two-way video use has, unsurprisingly, exploded with increased work, learning and socializing from home. The survey traced a massive increase in video conferencing use between 2019 to 2020 based on the pandemic, and a slight additional increase in 2021. Nearly 50% of respondents said they used two-way video for family-related communication in 2021; around a quarter used it for business and more than 20% used video for healthcare purposes.
