Internet service providers have voiced a growing lack of confidence in upstream fibre network operators, a new survey by the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa) has found.

The survey measures the views of Ispa members, which participated in a poll on the subject in February 2024. The results show an improvement in scores for MetroFibre , Link Africa and Liquid Intelligence Technologies, and slippage for Octotel, Openserve, Frogfoot, Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa.

About 50 ISPs participated in the latest poll conducted by Ispa. Association members were asked to rate the FNOs they do business with across 11 criteria, on a scale of 0-10. The previous survey took place in August 2023.

The two top-rated FNOs, MetroFibre and Link Africa, dominated the rankings for the individual metrics, with MetroFibre scoring highest for technical proficiency (7.5), communications (6.9), friendliness of staff (7.9), business processes (7.4), software systems (6.9) and optimism (6.7), while Link Africa excelled in value for money (7.8) and open-access principles (7.9).

Despite slipping significantly in the overall ratings, Openserve retained top spot for reliability (7.9). Octotel remained the FNO with the best support for ISPs (7.1). (See the table below for more details.)

The two networks that ISPs were most likely to recommend to other ISPs were MetroFibre and Liquid (tied at 6.4).

“Overall, ISPs’ confidence in their FNOs has slipped slightly since August, with the annual average of all FNOs dropping by 0.2 points to 6.0,” Ispa said.

Where they did badly

The lowest-scoring criteria overall are:

Optimism about whether an FNO will improve in the future (5.5);
Support provided to ISPs by FNOs (5.4); and
The likelihood of recommending a particular FNO to another ISP (5.3).

“Fibre operators hoping to improve their scores in the future should consider streamlining the support they provide to ISPs, making sure they have processes and staff capacity to resolve common issues, such as the difficulties consumers face when trying to migrate lines between ISPs,” Ispa said.

For the February survey, ISPs were given the opportunity to provide freeform feedback to each FNO. “This feedback unexpectedly revealed the importance of FNOs’ account managers. ISPs with a good account manager tended to rate that FNO far more positively, while those with a less skilled account manager were much more critical towards that FNO overall.”

FNO	Ave score (Aug 2023)	Ave score (Feb 2024)	Change
MetroFibre	6.8	6.9	0.1
Link Africa	5.9	6.8	0.9
Octotel	6.8	6.5	-0.3
Openserve	7	6.1	-0.9
Liquid Intelligent Tech	4.7	5.9	1.2
Frogfoot	6.3	5.3	-1
Vumatel	6	5.2	-0.8
Dark Fibre Africa	5.8	5	-0.8
Average	6.2	6	-0.2

The internet industry association said that although only nine operators were rated by a significant number of ISPs, there were another 23 networks included in the ratings.

The survey results showed that despite being ranked by fewer ISPs, some of the smaller networks did “very well”, with Evotel (7.5) and Zoom Fibre (7.4) achieving higher averages than all of the large networks. – © 2024 NewsCentral Media