European broadband CPE deployments: who’s leading the race towards Wi-Fi 6E and 7?

More than 200 European operators already offer Wi-Fi 6-enabled CPE Since its launch in 2019, the Wi-Fi 6 standard - also known as 802.11ax - has been widely distributed across Europe. Over 200 broadband operators on the continent are already offering Wi-Fi 6 compatible customer premise equipment, a huge leap compared to figures collected a couple of years ago. In most Western European markets, all tier-1 operators (except for a handful of belated actors) have launched Wi-Fi 6 gateways, all of which are being deployed on last-generation access networks: FTTH, DOCSIS 3.1 and new-generation copper technologies such as Super vectoring 35b and GFast. A dozen of operators across France, Spain, German-speaking markets, and Scandinavia have also started deploying routers able to support 10Gbps broadband access. A clear continuum exists between broadband infrastructures, customers’ in-home equipment, and their end devices. Markets with the fastest deployment of advanced CPE and largest potential in volume of equipped households are overlapping with countries where last-generation access networks are widely available: optical fiber in Spain, Switzerland, France, Italy and Portugal; DOCSIS 3.1 in Germany and Benelux. In Spain, three-quarters of households are already connected to fiber networks and the country is entering the last phase of fiber rollout, now expanding its access to underserved rural areas, in order to reach the 100% fiber coverage goal set up for 2025. To ensure the best experience for their end customers, Spanish telcos also had to deploy gateways and home networking devices that can support high-speed broadband and advanced features. Thus, all tier-1 operators have launched compatible gateways with the 802.11ax standard. Orange and Digi are also preparing the road towards multi-gigabit connectivity by deploying routers supporting XGS-PON access networks, respectively since 2018 and 2021. A total of 75 million households in Europe could already get access to a Wi-Fi 6 gateway from their internet service provider at the end of 2022. This figure is likely to notably increase with new significant launches such as Sky UK’s latest FTTP router which is expected to get commercialized later this year. Due to market fragmentation, leading European OEM suppliers work with an average of 15+ ISPs The vast majority of European operators offer devices from partnering manufacturers, sometimes specifically designed to answer their subscriber base needs and local market specificities. This wholesale deployment of gateways and associated devices enables ISPs to keep control over their product value chain and make sure their customers get the right equipment at home to receive quality services. If telcos are slowly dropping set-top boxes from their product lines and increasingly turning towards network and device-agnostic entertainment offers, this is definitely not the case in the broadband industry. Last year, while set-top-box manufacturers’ revenues were...