The demands of the “prosumer” are driving providers toward multi-gig and Wi-Fi 7 offerings, Fidium Chief Marketing Officer Dan Sumner told Telecompetitor in an interview last week.
Fidium just announced the launch of 5 Gig and 8 Gig symmetrical speeds along with Wi-Fi 7, which will be available in some of the company’s markets next month.
Sumner said the needs of consumers with the most internet usage drive the innovation eventually used by all consumers. “As time goes on, prosumer-oriented demand bleeds into the middle consumer. And we think it’s important to serve all customers.”
Fidium is introducing 5 Gig and 8 Gig speeds because of the demand for their 2 Gig service. “Households look increasingly like small enterprises, as the proliferation of connected everything competes for bandwidth,” Sumner said. He added that Fidium and other providers are introducing Wi-Fi 7 right now because demand is there.
“Pairing Wi-Fi 7 with a fiber-to-the-premises network is the peanut butter and chocolate of a connectivity service. One alone is great, but the real magic comes when you pair Wi-Fi 7 with a full-fiber network,” Sumner said.
Fidium serves rural, suburban, and urban markets — areas Sumner says all deserve premium services like Wi-Fi 7 and multi-gig connections. “People are working and doing things from rural areas that, pre-COVID, would never have been possible. So, if you want to empower those communities to have their full economic potential realized, you have to make those investments [in premium services].”
The implementation of Wi-Fi 7 and new multi-gig speeds isn’t the only reason Fidium has been in the news recently. The company has secured $67.1 million in provisional awards for both fiber and fixed wireless networks in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program.
How does Fidium decide where to deploy fiber or fixed wireless? “Our focus is making the right decisions to ensure access is sustainable and cost-effective for the communities we serve,” Sumner said. “Fidium always leads with fiber. In the rare cases where deploying fiber isn’t cost-effective for us or for customers, we may leverage alternative technologies, but those situations represent only a small minority of deployments.”
