Fibre broadband: Is it really an ADSL cannibal?

Superfast broadband, fibre broadband, FTTC – whatever you want to call it, it’s being promoted and discussed everywhere you look at the minute. Availability of FTTC is expanding rapidly, with over 66% of the UK now able to access the technology. That’s why pretty much every ISP out there is heavily promoting their own superfast broadband services to take advantage of this booming market. But, is fibre broadband simply an ADSL cannibal? What’s an ADSL Cannibal? By that I mean, customers with existing ADSL/2+ services simply upgrading to a fibre based service with their existing provider as opposed to new customers being attracted to the ISP. In other words is fibre broadband just a customer retention tool or is it also a useful customer attraction tool? Ofcom’s latest ‘Telecoms Market Data Tables’ support the theory that more existing ADSL/2+ customers are moving to fibre broadband services as traditional ADSL lines appear to have shrunk whilst fibre continues to boom with 3,370,000 upgrades to fibre.

• ISPReview.co.uk: Fibre Cannibalises ADSL as UK Fixed Line Broadband ISP Lines Hit 23.4m

However, in our experience, we are seeing both new customer attraction and retention! Whilst we too are seeing a large number of existing ADSL/2+ customers upgrade to capture the benefits of fibre broadband, we are also seeing a good percentage of new customers. In the last 12 months alone we’ve seen 91% growth in fibre broadband! Is it necessarily a bad thing anyway? Even if fibre broadband is for the most part a retention tool, is that such a bad thing? As we all know from experience, the broadband market is highly competitive and extremely price sensitive. Surely, any new technology that enables us to not only retain existing customers but also tie them in to longer term contracts (12 months instead of 30 days for Entanet resellers) and generates potentially higher monthly incomes from them (as fibre packages tend to be more expensive than standard broadband) can surely only be of benefit to the ISP? We think so. That’s why we’ve been encouraging our own channel partners to take full advantage of the fibre broadband boom. We even provide a useful report within synergi (our partner portal) that identifies all customers currently on an older technology but with the option to upgrade to a newer one e.g. ADSL to fibre. If you’re not yet offering and promoting fibre broadband to your existing customer base and potential new customers- why not? You could be missing out on valuable opportunities. Have your say! Are you experiencing customer retention thanks to fibre broadband? or are most of your fibre customers new? Share your experiences and opinions with us by leaving us a comment below. Related articles

• Entanet Opinion: Focus on fibre: How can resellers benefit from the rollout’s progress?
• Entanet Opinion: Fibre Broadband Jumping Hurdles
• Entanet Opinion: Fuss ‘n’ Fibre
• Entanet Opinion: Is broadband still suitable for business use?

Further information

• ISPReview.co.uk: Ofcom – Average UK Home Broadband Speeds Jump to Reach 22.8Mbps
• Ofcom: Telecommunications Market Data Update Q3 2014

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