Fiber dominates broadband experience over Fixed Wireless Access in Australia

Key findings:

• Our users in Australia have, on average, a far superior broadband experience when using Fiber compared to Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). Fiber users see 82% of tests passing our quality thresholds, while only 68% do so on FWA. Additionally, Fiber users generally enjoy a "Very Good" experience with on-demand video streaming services, surpassing those on FWA, who on average have a "Good" experience.
• The experience gap between Fiber and FWA widens in rural areas, with the gap in the number of tests passing our quality thresholds (referred to as Consistent Quality) increasing from 12 to 25 percentage points; while Video Experience widens in similar proportions from a gap of 6 to 12 points on a 100-point scale.
• Fiber users have a stable experience throughout the day, while FWA users experience significant congestion related declines, especially in the afternoon. Users on FWA see their broadband meeting thresholds for common application requirements at 78% of the tests at night vs. 69% in the afternoon.

In this analysis, Opensignal examines the broadband experiences of Australian users with the two most prominent competing access technologies: fiber-to-the-premise (FTTP), henceforth referred to as ‘Fiber,’ and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). Data from our users indicate that Fiber provides a superior experience compared to FWA, both on average across the country and when analyzed by comparing rural and urban areas, as well as when comparing experience during different hours of the day.

All three national mobile operators in Australia — Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone (TPG) — actively provide FWA to consumers, alongside the National Broadband Network (nbn) project. These FWA operators utilize super-fast 5G home broadband and continue to operate and market traditional 4G LTE wireless access. Recent upgrades to the nbn Fixed Wireless network aim to improve speeds and expand coverage, particularly in regional and remote areas, highlighting the strategic importance of FWA in bridging the digital divide in Australia.

To understand how these networks affect real-life users, we have examined two key metrics of everyday end-user experience: Consistent Quality and Video Experience.

Analyzing Consistent Quality and Video Experience across Australia, we see that our users' experience is significantly better on Fiber connections compared to FWA. Consistent Quality measures how often a user's experience on a network is sufficient to support common application requirements such as video calling, uploading content or playing multiplayer games. It is expressed as a percentage of tests that pass thresholds for network speeds, latency, jitter, packet discard and time to first byte. Our users see their experience exceed these thresholds in 81.5% of the tests on Fiber — 13.7 percentage points higher than the respective score for FWA connections. This gap translates into a significantly improved experience on Fiber compared to FWA for everyday broadband usage.

Our users on Fiber also report a Video Experience score of 75.7 on a 100-point scale, putting it in the Very Good (68-78) experience category – meaning users are able to stream video at 1080p with satisfactory loading times and little stalling. This score is derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) approach and applied to our users’ real-world video stream measurements. The equivalent experience on FWA is 67.8 points, placing it in the Good (58-68) category, where users typically need to stream at 720p for a satisfactory experience.

In this analysis, we further investigate the differences between rural and urban areas of Australia, as broadband infrastructure for both Fiber and FWA can vary significantly based on the location of the household. These differences can stem from how the household is connected to the nearest internet exchange, the modernity of the infrastructure serving the connection and the available bandwidth in the area.

While the user experience on Fiber connections is statistically unchanged between rural and urban areas of Australia, users on FWA connections have a substantially worse experience in rural areas. Typically, wireless connections in rural areas rely on lower frequency spectrum bands (i.e., 700 MHz, 850 MHz, 900 MHz used by Australian operators) that have greater distance propagation but lower bandwidth compared to the higher frequency bands serving densely populated areas (e.g., 2100 MHz, 2600 MHz, 3500 MHz, 3700 MHz). As a result, the difference in Consistent Quality between Fiber and FWA increases from 11.6 percentage points in urban areas to 24.7 points in rural areas, and the equivalent difference in Video Experience goes from 5.9 points to 11.8 points.

Our analysis, looking at experience during different hours of the day, reveals greater susceptibility of FWA to congestion and variations in user experience during busy hours. During the night (00:00 - 05:59), when there is low network congestion, users on both Fiber and FWA connections experience high levels of Consistent Quality. Those on Fiber see 85.5% of tests meeting the required thresholds during the night, with minor fluctuations throughout the day – dropping lowest in the morning (82.9%) and remaining relatively stable in the afternoon (84.6%) and evening (83.6%) hours. In stark contrast, users on FWA connections see a significant decline in Consistent Quality from 78.3% at night to just 69.0% in the afternoon (12:00 - 17:59), representing a 9.3-point decline. For Video Experience, the comparable scores decline by just 2.3 points for Fiber connections, and by 7.6 points for FWA connections.

Conclusion

This analysis underscores the significant superiority of user experience on Fiber over FWA connections in Australia. Our recent research on Italy, focusing specifically on 5G FWA, showed that the transition from LTE-based FWA to 5G FWA has significantly improved speed and service quality for FWA users. While 5G FWA still could not compete with fiber-to-the-home in terms of speed in the country, it offered a level of Consistent Quality on par with fiber connections. Another recent Opensignal study looked in detail at how 5G FWA is emerging as an alternative to traditional broadband technologies worldwide and showed that operators in the U.S. and India’s Jio have successfully integrated wireless broadband without impacting the experience on their mobile service.

Opensignal has deep insight into the real-world fixed broadband experience, which can be used to inform commercial decision-making and better understand how ISPs compare against each other. For more information on how Opensignal can aid both your network and marketing operations, please contact us.