How CPE fragments customer bases

CPE fragmentation has happened in gradual steps, from moves to new hardware vendors, equipment updates from existing vendors, and big tech marketing their equipment directly to consumers. Throw in an acquisition or two, which comes with the acquired company’s tech stack, and ISPs are left with a subscriber base whose CPE breakdown looks like Figure 1 (see below).

This fragmentation creates a massive problem for ISPs because suddenly it becomes nearly impossible to create any semblance of consistency in subscribers’ experience. They have no consistent data about issues that happen within their subscriber base. There are simply too many variables, too many different data points. Agents must ask too many questions and consider too many possibilities just to be able to solve an issue.

Figure 1: CPE breakdown across subscriber base of North American ISP.

Take an ISP that supports three different routers—let’s call them router A, B, and C—each of which have their own backend providing various levels of visibility into the customer’s network. Now every support call your agents take has 60 seconds of added time as your agents play trial and error trying to sort out which dashboard they need to go to for that customer. Attach that to the fact that each of those systems probably provides a different set of information; router A might have great per-device diagnostics while router B doesn't, for instance. Now you have a situation where, every call, the agent needs to invent a new troubleshooting process based on the diagnostics available. It's easy to see that the 'tax' you pay by having multiple systems (or, even worse, by not having them at all for certain cases) builds quickly, diminishing