Throughout this year, I’ve been hearing the phrase “good enough broadband” to describe consumers willing to take slower, less robust broadband connections in order to save money. This is most commonly used when referring to FWA broadband, but I’ve seen big ISP executives using the phrase when talking about customers who leave fiber for any slower technology.

This is not a new phenomenon. I recall statistics from five years ago that showed that up to 25% of customers in cities still bought DSL delivered over copper. At best, urban DSL had download speeds of 100 Mbps, but the majority of DSL was a lot slower than that, with most urban customers seeing download speeds between 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps. Cable companies always tried to win over the DSL customers, but cable was always a lot more expensive than DSL.

As big urban telcos decided to get rid of copper, they raised DSL rates to between $55 and $65 per month, eliminating much of the savings for sticking with copper. We have no way of knowing where FWA has gained customers, because the big cable and fiber companies deny that customers are leaving them for FWA. But at the end of the second quarter, the three big cellular carriers grew to reach 16.5 million FWA customers, and according to Ookla, 70% of these customers are in cities and suburbs, where customers have access to cable and/or fiber.

Those FWA customers have to be coming from somewhere. It seems likely to me that FWA has gained a lot of its growth from customers fleeing the increasing cost of DSL. For the last two years, customers have been able to bundle FWA home broadband with an existing cellular product for as low as $35 per month, making it far more attractive than DSL (and every other broadband product).

One aspect of thinking of broadband as good enough is to look at how customers use broadband. Not all broadband customers need big bandwidth. Households who use broadband mostly to stream and to do basic things like shopping or banking on the web are likely fairly satisfied with slower broadband. Households with only basic broadband needs don’t feel like they are settling for something inferior, and in fact, they probably think that people spending more for broadband are wasting their money.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of homes that feel like they are trading down if they opt for cheaper broadband. The big limitation of all technologies other than fiber is slower upload speeds. Cable company upload speeds have gotten a lot better, but technologies like DSL and DWA struggle to achieve the FCC’s definition of broadband of 20 Mbps upload.

I’ve heard a lot of ISPs with relatively slow broadband say that their 20 Mbps upload speeds are all that people need. But the reality is this isn’t so for many consumers. First, technologies like FWA don’t have the steady, constant upload speeds like fiber, and the speed can vary a lot from second to second and can kick people off video calls or connections to the office or school. The real quality test of a broadband connection is not the speed that can be achieved in a speed test, but whether somebody can maintain an online session for an hour or more.

One thing that I think is certain is that we are going to continue to see more homes downsize broadband as household budgets continue to tighten. A lot of customers will sadly decide that slower broadband is better than no broadband.

Related to this is a recent blog I wrote about households that drop broadband when they can’t afford the bill, but who come back when they scrape together enough cash. Let’s face it, tightening household finances means more churn and uncertainty for ISPs.