Jill Marx: The Marketing Fix Behind Multi-Gig Adoption

When a fiber provider launches a multi-gig internet tier, the pitch is easy. Fastest speeds available, more bandwidth than you will ever need, ready for whatever comes next. What that pitch usually skips over is a straightforward question about how many homes in the service area can actually use those speeds once a customer signs up.

The network may be able to deliver them, but the equipment inside the home and its infrastructure may not.

Working in a municipal fiber market, we have found that the number of homes a network passes is not the same as the number of homes that can realistically receive multi-gig service. In many markets, those two numbers are far apart, and building a campaign around the larger number produces subscriber projections that will not hold up.

The bottleneck is inside the customer’s house

Fiber can bring 2 Gbps or more to a home's exterior. What the customer actually receives depends on equipment they own, starting with the router that connects the provider's gateway to the rest of the house and the wiring and Wi-Fi hardware distributing that signal to each room and device.

A router purchased a few years ago may only handle speeds well below what the fiber can deliver, regardless of which tier the customer subscribes to. This is not unusual. As of 2024, the 300 Mbps to 1 Gbps router segment accounted for nearly 47% of U.S. residential wireless router market revenue. Because routers stay in homes for years after purchase, that sales figure understates how far behind the broader installed base already is.

A customer whose router cannot handle multi-gig speeds is unlikely to keep paying for them. And a customer who signs up, runs a speed test and sees numbers far below what they are paying for will call to complain. That conversation is hard to resolve without acknowledging a gap the operator could have identified earlier.

Older homes make the problem bigger

The issue is more pronounced in markets with older housing. The median age of a U.S. owner-occupied home is 42 years, and nearly half of all owner-occupied homes were built before 1980. Homes built in 2010 or later, when builders began incorporating infrastructure better suited to high-speed internet, make up roughly 13% of the total housing stock.

This is precisely the profile of communities BEAD is designed to serve. Rural and underserved markets that have historically lacked broadband access tend to have older homes, older wiring and older consumer equipment than urban markets where fiber has been available for years. For operators deploying into those communities right now, the gap between homes passed and homes genuinely ready for multi-gig service is not a minor footnote. It is a material variable in subscriber projections, and treating it as interchangeable with total homes passed is a planning error that shows up later as missed targets.

Size the market before committing to the campaign

The solution is not to slow down multi-gig deployment. It is to understand the actual addressable market before locking in subscriber targets.

Some operators are closing the equipment gap by offering CPE programs or router subsidies when a customer signs up for a multi-gig tier. That is the most direct fix available. For operators not ready to go that route, the first step is determining how many homes in the territory can actually receive multi-gig speeds today. Router market share data by speed tier is publicly available. Housing age by census geography is publicly available. Many operators already have data on what equipment their current subscribers are running.

That information should produce two separate estimates, one for homes ready to receive gigabit service and one for homes ready to receive multi-gig service. Treating every home passed as an equally likely multi-gig subscriber overstates the market. The industry is already running into what one analyst called "a practical wall, not a technical one," with operators finding that customers neither need nor fully use multi-gig tiers. In many markets, the in-home equipment gap explains a significant share of that pattern.

Fiber infrastructure will outlast the routers sitting behind it. The question every operator should be asking now is whether subscriber projections reflect what the network can deliver at the street, or what the customer can actually use inside the home.

Jill Marx is Marketing and Communications Manager at Fort Collins Connexion, a municipal fiber utility serving more than 25,000 customers in Fort Collins, Colo., and named one of PCMag's Best ISPs in 2024. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.

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