An Unavoidable Problem: How ISPs Should Prepare for the Coming Spike

ISPs have a data problem. Every day, more and more devices are being connected to home networks – connected Smart Homes are expected to be a $99-billion industry this year. Each device adds to the burden placed on the home’s WiFi router. And these devices are seeing a lot of use.

COVID-19 sped up the arrival of the long-anticipated remote work revolution, with nearly three out of four American office workers working from home at the height of the pandemic, and a fair number of them determined to keep working from home at least part of the time from now on. Data usage rose 47 percent during the quarantine, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will soon generate 79.4 zetabytes of data per year.

As these factors exert massive pressure on bandwidth and WiFi reliability, ISPs will need to reduce service interruptions, improve call center efficiency, and eliminate unnecessary on-site service calls.

An Ounce of Prevention

The best way to minimize stress on call centers is to make sure the call never comes by keeping the internet up and running. Anticipating demand can prevent congestion, so it only makes sense to rely on data collection and analytics to better predict where usage will spike. This means installing better monitoring equipment throughout the network but especially in homes. Then improvements such as fiber-optic cable should be installed in busier neighborhoods, with a shift of focus to residential areas which are suddenly going to be producing quite a lot of data.

ISPs should also provide their domestic customers with better in-home equipment. State-of-the art modems and routers are required to process the volume of information a smart home will produce, and it will no longer be enough to provide a single hub — larger houses will need extenders and wireless hubs, all of which should come prepared with that improved monitoring equipment for collecting data. Residences will need high-quality, high-yield, internet equipment just to process all the information a smart home will burn through and pump out.

Finally, it is vital to improve residential network security across the entire network but especially in people’s homes. With so many interconnected devices, the opportunities for hackers and other bad actors to sneak into a system and steal data are astounding. And malware does more than steal data — it also drastically slows down infected systems, creating a much higher burden for the ISP to process all the information the smart home and IoT create.

And as more and more users’ security become compromised, this burden will increase exponentially. This ISPs must load their new home equipment with firewalls and even include security software in their internet packages, at the very least to prevent IoT and smart home users from creating massive drags across an entire provider’s service in an area.

Empowering Customers, Reducing Dispatches

Without interfering with or spying on users’ private data, these intermediary systems detect the source of internet shutdowns, rather than just telling the user they need to be fixed. ISPs could automatically send upgraded hardware to customers with outdated modems or routers and make this hardware easy to install without a technician on-site.

Customers could also download troubleshooting apps, which can probe the network to find the real problem and even sometimes fix it before a call is ever made. Such an app could also guide the customer or an ISP technician through a self-diagnosis and troubleshooting process, speeding resolution, and raising customer education all at once.

When customers use these measures, service truck dispatches are cut in half, and as much as 45 percent of service calls can be resolved via an automated troubleshooting menu, and total call times can drop by 60 percent. As companies spend less time and manpower on connectivity issues, they spend less money and can enjoy the rise in customer satisfaction as fewer calls means fewer problems.

Once ISPs have improved overall carriage capacity to anticipate the rise in usage and taken steps to empower their users to fix their own issues, they will have solved much of the problem facing providers in the near future. Bandwidth will drop or fail only very rarely, and when it does fail, the ISP will only rarely need to dispatch a technician, saving themselves money and their clients time and frustration.

Internet slowdowns and service interruptions are, unfortunately, as old as the internet itself. By upgrading their infrastructure and monitoring systems, and empowering customers to troubleshoot on their own, ISPs can take most of the threat out of these problems, helping home networks usher in the work-from-home revolution while preparing for the rise of our futuristic Smart Homes yet to come.