As the Customer Churns: The Growing FWA Challenge

The global 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) market may be on the rise—it’s predicted to expand annually by more than 21 percent from 2024 to 2031—but the growing problem of customer churn is eating into the profitability of this business.

The reasons for this churn are manyfold, but the primary customer complaint has been that performance has failed to live up to expectations. Part of this is attributable to abuse by some customers who share the service in a manner that violates their contract. These “heavy users” are overburdening the network, which causes other users to experience slower service or degradation in service.

In some respects, 5G wireless networks were never intended to be used in the manner that FWA requires of them. Mobile users of 5G rely on different cell towers as they shift from location to location. This spreads the bandwidth demands around. However, because of the fixed nature of FWA, users are concentrating demand on a single tower. This was never the envisioned design of the network. As a result, heavy users cause traffic to spike, overwhelming the network’s ability to handle what can be a crushing demand. Communications service providers (CSPs) are simply not used to managing this excessive traffic behavior because it is localized and not spread across the network.

Persistent drops and increasing lag times are turning customers off. To combat this rising problem, CSPs can upgrade cells and increase the number of towers, but this comes with additional challenges. Adding more towers can lead to interference problems and loss of packets. Customers experience this as jittery or delayed communications. And of course, adding more cells becomes cost-prohibitive, potentially outweighing the return on investment (ROI).

Greater Visibility Down to the User Level Is Key to Reducing FWA Churn

To identify those heavy users, CSPs need greater visibility down to the user level. This requires monitoring and analyzing control and user-plane traffic. Armed with this degree of visibility, CSPs gain visibility into RAN access, which enables them to determine what cell, what sector, and what equipment is overburdened and/or misbehaving. This granular view into user behavior can help to identify problems caused by, for example, heavy users. With this knowledge, CSPs can take appropriate measures to control the service and ensure performance is at peak.

Accomplishing this critically important objective requires the implementation of a comprehensive observability solution that can monitor, control, and user-plane traffic across the entire network. Traditionally, only a sample of traffic has been used for this purpose, but that is not sufficient to pinpoint the true culprit. Monitoring traffic end-through-end is the best way to gain the insights needed to rapidly address interference and throughput issues down to the user.

NETSCOUT’s best-in-class 5G FWA monitoring solution provides the extensive network visibility needed to observe traffic levels and analyze applications for key performance indicators (KPIs) related to responsiveness, errors, conversations, user experience, and service dependencies by market¬—all the way down to the subscriber level. This empowers CSPs with the insights needed to better manage the complexity of 5G FWA. This depth and breadth of visibility enables teams to ensure performance and quality of service, which is crucial to delivering the best end-user experience. And that is the key to reducing churn, which is top-of-mind for every carrier.

Learn more about how CSPs can address the 5G FWA churn dilemma.