My Expensive New Gaming Router Provides Great Wi-Fi, But Doesn’t Prioritise Traffic as Promised :o(
Are gaming and its user experience a new opportunity for operators?
There’s a new hype sweeping the ISP world. It started with the ever-growing importance of connectivity at home. As our lives become more and more digital, so does the importance of our Internet access. A few years ago, we started seeing Wi-Fi enter Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, initially as a joke, but always near to, or at the bottom.
Wi-Fi has now become a much more significant concern for operators. Until recently, call centre personnel would have little advice for users complaining of Wi-Fi coverage issues at home except to advise them to buy retail Wi-Fi repeaters. Vendors started addressing this almost a decade ago, and now all major ISPs have such solutions as part of their core offering (or soon to be).
Despite the gradual rise of marketing teams over the last twenty years, we’re still more of a tech-push industry than a market-pull one. Rather than address users’ real concerns, vendors and operators alike have focused on a few very specific techniques to improve Wi-Fi at home like beamforming, automatic channel selection or bad-apple detection.
