Changes are coming to home broadband. Expect prosumer offers, WFH special features and consumer SDWAN

Expect a big upsurge in "prosumer" and WFH broadband over the next year, including consumer-oriented SDWAN approaches, FWA bundles and more. This offers opportunities for fixed and mobile telcos, Wi-Fi and gateway vendors, and enterprise systems-integrators and resellers.

Lockdowns have led to massive surges in home broadband demand. ISPs' networks have generally held up well, as home working and education has (mostly) just smoothed out evening streaming peaks across the whole day. Uplink data has risen much faster than downlink, because of cloud and video-calling use.

Mobile usage has been relatively flat during lockdown. Lower out-of-home usage (especially at entertainment venues and in-car) has been offset by non-WiFi / non-fixed broadband users consuming more data at home. FWA connections have been growing where available, and broadly mirroring fibre / cable usage trends.

But other issues are more complex.

Employers are struggling with their home-workers' poor bandwidth (especially upstream), unreliable connections and new network-security risks. Households with 2+ adults doing WFH, plus children home-schooling (or playing games) struggle with capacity and prioritisation. Some people are working from the garage, attic, garden shed or anywhere there is space - but perhaps not Wi-Fi coverage. (Ironically, I'm now working from my basement, which is actually where my Wi-Fi AP is, so my broadband experience is actually better than normal).

We will see many solutions:

• Extension of company BYOD mobile policies, covering costs of upgrades to existing home broadband
• Telcos offering high-QoS partitions on existing broadband
• Small-biz broadband products sold for home use, including via employers
• Businesses giving WFH staff a dedicated FWA modem or mobile hotspot, kept completely separate from normal home-broadband, for easier management by IT staff
  
• Home Wi-Fi improvements where in-home is the bottleneck (especially using WiFi6 & mesh). This is already filtering through via retail, but expect more ISPs/telcos to offer upgrades to old CPE soon.
  
• Fixed+cellular converged broadband gateways, especially where 5G is available
• 3rd-party gateways acting as SDWAN nodes, bonding fixed broadband with mobile/FWA from another telco
• Second fixed connections to homes, in areas where there are 2+ fibre/cable infrastructure providers
  

There will be no obvious single "winner" here - it will depend on a given country's competitive landscape for broadband, telcos with new fibre build-outs looking for quick wins, urban density, single homes vs. apartments, availability and capacity of 4G/5G FWA networks, family size & make-up and much more. I'd expect dozens of innovative offers to emerge over the next 2-12 months.

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