Gone are the days when having the best internet connection was based on speed (dial-up modems led us down this rock-strewn path). The reality is that modern life demands a fixed broadband connection that keeps us connected, productive, and frustration-free. It needs to be reliable.
So, an unreliable connection is not just inconvenient, it can cost us money, opportunities, and a whole lot of stress. Imagine dropped calls during a work video conference, constantly buffering while streaming a movie, or smart home devices going haywire – not exactly the recipe for a smooth digital life.
Why Speed Tests Don't Tell the Whole Story: The Multi-Device Challenge
Today's households are juggling an ever-growing number of devices – the average US home has a whopping 17! Ensuring all these devices stay connected and run smoothly requires a new measure of quality. Instead of chasing peak speeds for a single device at random times, the real question is: can your internet handle the daily demands of your entire household, all at once?
At Opensignal, we understand the frustration of a sluggish internet connection when multiple devices are competing for bandwidth. That's why we developed the Broadband Reliability Experience metric. It assesses how well a household's internet copes with real-world scenarios. Imagine a child doing homework upstairs while one parent is on a video call and another browses recipes. Or picture a group of teens catching up on social media during a sleepover while parents are downstairs streaming a movie. These situations and countless others demand a stable and reliable broadband connection, where everything runs smoothly—no buffering, no lag, and no dropped connections for any member. But, contrary to popular belief, customers don’t need stratospheric speeds to satisfy these typical situations.
Globally the top application category for broadband downstream volume is video, with applications like Netflix at minimum requiring only 5Mbps for Full HD video delivery. The second most common category of applications is social media; the likes of Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram require similar bandwidth. And while there are more demanding applications, like cloud gaming, these are only used by a small percentage of users. In fact, there is growing realization and research that supports the fact that smaller bandwidth pipes can be sufficient for typical household fixed broadband applications.
For these reasons, when defining our Opensignal fixed broadband reliability metric we decided to consider thresholds designed around a minimum typical requirement - not the type of situations that might exist for 1% of the connected population, but circumstances that exist for the vast majority of global internet households guided by the principle that reliability should represent a household's ability to connect and complete typical internet tasks. For fixed broadband, this led us to the conclusion that 25Mbps was the right downlink threshold to define a connection as reliable.
What Makes a Reliable Connection?
Download throughput is not the only consideration. Our Broadband Reliability Experience metric measures the entire user experience, from establishing a connection to successfully completing tasks like streaming video, browsing the web, and scrolling through social media. It captures the true end-to-end reliability experience by analyzing the two most popular internet protocols - TCP (transmission control protocol) and UDP (user datagram protocol) - to comprehensively measure every aspect of households' experience with their ISP’s network. We can assess when things are working flawlessly, when something is erratic, and when there is no connection at all. Importantly while other Opensignal metrics consider the experience of a typical user, Broadband Reliability considers experiences appropriate across a typical home, painting a picture of how well the internet works for everyone in the household.
Calculated on a scale of 100-1000, with higher scores indicating better Reliability Experience, the metric consists of three main components:
- Connectivity: Measuring the household's ability to connect to the internet. While ISPs strive to provide ubiquitous connectivity there are often events that lead to outages, and the connectivity component of the score captures the proportion of times when households don’t have internet access.
- Completion: Completion measures the ability to complete typical tasks. It ensures that the established connection is maintained and there is a consistent flow of information as consumers would expect.
- Sufficiency: Ensures that the task is performed sufficiently well. This component includes speed thresholds, latency thresholds, jitter, and other technical components that are prerequisites for good service and application experiences.
Our Broadband Reliability Experience metric will now be a part of our regular global, regional, and market reports on Fixed Broadband Network Experience. Please subscribe to our newsletter to be informed when we publish reports on the markets you care about most.
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