A recent article in Telecompetitor describes a new white paper from Parks Associates and TechSee that reports that broadband customers with poor WiFi are six times more likely to say that they will change ISP. This finding documents something that all ISPs know and is what I call the WiFi dilemma. ISPs can deliver great bandwidth to the home, but customers judge them by the performance inside the home.

The report is based on 8,000 surveys of Internet households that were conducted in late 2025. The results are stated in terms of the net promoter score (NPS), which is a standard used in many industries that is based on the degree to which customers would give a good rating of a company to their friends and neighbors.

The results of the survey are sobering for any ISP. Customers who have WiFi dead spots in their home had an NPS of -17. Customers with slow perceived download speeds had an NPS of -19. Customers who had a negative customer service experience had an NPS of -19. Customers who had all three problems had an NPS of -28.

To put those numbers into perspective, the average broadband customer without any of these problems had an NPS of +22. That’s a big difference compared to customers with problems, because a positive NPS means a customer has an overall positive opinion of an ISP, while a negative NPS means they don’t. Most importantly, 43% of customers with all three problems said they were likely to change ISPS, while only 7% of customers without these problems were thinking of changing ISPs. I wrote a blog recently that talked about how poor economics had increased churn rates across the country. But poor broadband performance has always been a major cause of churn.

Why did the blog header call this a WiFi dilemma? If an ISP requires customers to use its WiFi router, then any WiFi issues inside the home are going to be completely blamed on the ISP. If ISPs allow customers to bring their own WiFi routers, ISPs are still going to be blamed when those routers are out of date or configured poorly.

ISPs face myriad WiFi issues with customers. A lot of houses need WiFi extenders or a mesh network to reach all parts of the home, and a lot of ISPs don’t help customers go through the painstaking process of placing extenders in the optimum locations. Even when an ISP helps a customer set up a WiFi mesh network to work well, customers change things to disrupt the WiFi. One of my favorite stories is from a technician who visited a home complaining about poor bandwidth, only to find that the homeowner had put the router behind a heavy metal file cabinet.

Customers often have WiFi problems that are related to the performance of the devices like TVs or computers that are connected to the WiFi. Customers don’t understand how the WiFi signal weakens with distance and from passing through walls and are unhappy when speeds are slower at the far ends of the house from the WiFi router. Technicians get frustrated when they find customers using WiFi routers that are several generations old – that might have been bought at a yard sale.

The dilemma ISPs face is how much effort to put into keeping customers happy with poor WiFi. Truck rolls are expensive and can’t solve some of the issues. Helping customers remotely to solve WiFi issues is time-consuming and can be frustrating for both parties.

Unfortunately, many ISPs have trained customers that speeds matter more than performance, so these issues are likely to get worse as WiFi routers get older and customer expectations grow higher. I know a lot of ISPs who deal with this issue well, through dedicating technician time to keep customers happy, but many ISPs have decided they can’t afford that effort.