Key Takeaways

• The Era of Connectivity Has Changed: As customer expectations increase and high-speed internet access matures, the new No. 1 battleground for ISP customer satisfaction and retention is the “last 50 feet”—the in-building Wi-Fi experience. For enterprises, the move to wireless-first has made Wi-Fi the backbone of employee productivity and operational continuity.

• There is a Massive Market Gap: The industry’s current two-tiered support model relies on either low-visibility guesswork without specialized tools that leads to costly repeat truck rolls, or unscalable expert devices that are too expensive and complex to deploy fleetwide.

• Speedtest Pulse™ Fills This Gap: We built Speedtest Pulse to solve this specific, costly problem. Pulse is a new, professional-grade diagnostic tool, precision-engineered at a disruptive price point. It empowers every frontline technician—for the first time—to definitively validate installs, resolve Wi-Fi issues on the first visit, and provide proof of performance.

The Connectivity Landscape Today

Wi-Fi is now the primary lens through which residential and business customers experience and judge their internet service. For Internet Service Providers (ISPs), controlling the quality of that experience has become a critical battleground for customer satisfaction and retention. For enterprises, Wi-Fi is the backbone of employee productivity and a critical component of core operations.

The internet’s evolution is driven by a constant cycle between infrastructure and applications. When ISPs build faster networks, they create new capacity. Application developers fill that capacity with more demanding experiences, such as the shift from standard-definition to 4K streaming. These new, richer applications quickly become the standard, raising user expectations and creating demand for even more network speed and quality. This virtuous circle in which infrastructure enables innovation, innovation raises consumer expectations, and together those create demands for better infrastructure, is the engine that pushes our digital world forward.

For the last two decades, ISPs have viewed their greatest challenge as the last mile—the final leg of the network connecting their infrastructure to the subscriber’s premises. This became the industry’s primary focus, the biggest driver of capital expenditure (CapEx), and the main competitive battleground.

And now, that last-mile challenge is fundamentally changing, largely becoming a problem of execution and investment—not capability. The industry has multiple, powerful paths to deliver speed—from fiber and DOCSIS 4.0 to innovations in low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite and fixed wireless access (FWA). While the competition to deploy these solutions is immense, the raw speed to the doorstep is less of a problem for a majority of customers in advanced markets.

For an increasing number of ISPs and their customers, the challenge is no longer about getting the necessary speed to the building, but about what happens once it gets inside. By delivering all that speed to the modem, ISPs have also shined a massive spotlight on a new bottleneck: the in-building Wi-Fi experience—the “last 50 feet.” The entire digital experience, from the enterprise to the living room, is now wireless. For example, the average U.S. internet household has about 17 connected devices, and the Macbook Pro hasn’t had an ethernet port in over a decade.

Rising Consumer Expectations

This new in-building bottleneck—where weak Wi-Fi coverage, interference, congestion, or device issues can cause slow speeds or other issues—hasn’t just created a technical problem; it has exposed a massive gap between what customers now expect and what most ISPs efficiently deliver. While Ookla data confirms broadband speeds are rising, the customer sentiment of fiber customers is actually declining. New benchmarks from the American Customer Satisfaction Index show every single one of 14 key satisfaction metrics—from reliability to streaming quality—declined from 2024 to 2025 among fiber customers.

Consumer expectations have fundamentally changed, shifting away from just speed and towards whole-home or business connectivity. In fact, consumers now see their ISP as the single point of responsibility for their entire connected experience. The proof is in the data: a 2025 Techsee report based on a survey of nearly four thousand U.S. households found that 77% of consumers expect providers to test coverage during installation and verify that every room is connected. They don’t just want a promise of speed; they want trusted proof of coverage.

This new expectation comes with a severe, high-stakes penalty for failure: customer churn. Customer loyalty is no longer tied to the last-mile cable, but to the quality of the in-home experience. The same Techsee study found that 51% of consumers would switch providers if their Wi-Fi issues aren’t resolved quickly. This is the new battleground for customers, fought across the entire in-home experience, from the living room to the back bedroom to every corner where users expect flawless connectivity.

The problem is that ISPs are being held accountable for an environment they can’t see, which poses a significant reputational risk. This gap between customer expectations and reality is already at a breaking point.

• 68% of households reported Wi-Fi problems in the past 12 months. 
• 39% of those households required a technician to be dispatched, a process commonly known as a “truck roll.” 
• Worse, about 20% of those costly truck rolls failed to resolve the issue on the first visit—a classic “No Fault Found” scenario where the tech proves the speed to the modem is good, but the customer’s problem remains unsolved.

Based on these figures, common connectivity issues can cost a typical ISP with one million subscribers up to $140 million annually in customer churn and technician costs.

This crisis of rising expectations, however, hides a massive opportunity. Data shows that customers aren’t unreasonable; they just want proof. In fact, 56% of consumers said they would purchase additional equipment, like mesh systems, if a technician presented them with clear evidence of coverage gaps.

The findings from the Techsee study create a clear mandate for ISPs: solve the top customer complaint (in-home Wi-Fi issues), reduce repeat truck rolls, stop churn, and turn a costly service call into a new revenue stream by giving technicians the proof they need to recommend upgrades or additional equipment that improve the in-home experience.

Gap in Current ISP Solutions

The industry has been actively trying to gain visibility into the in-home experience for years. The problem is that the available tools were either not purpose-built or not scalable for this new, complex, and highly variable environment. This critical mismatch has forced providers into a largely broken, two-tiered operational model.

The first tier is the default model for the vast majority of subscribers, and relies on low-visibility guesswork. When a customer calls their ISP with a Wi-Fi complaint, the ISP’s diagnostics stop at the modem, providing an “inside-out” view, using CPE-embedded tools. This approach, which Ookla also provides, is valuable for getting a performance baseline from the router, or for proving service levels to the router. However, it cannot measure the true customer experience, which happens on a device two rooms away. This inside-out view is also completely blind the moment a customer plugs in their own router, leaving support teams with little or zero visibility.

This process inevitably results in a “No Fault Found” truck roll. A frontline technician is dispatched—at significant operational cost—without the tools needed to definitively diagnose the in-building problem. Instead, the technician is limited to confirming whether the service to the home is working, leaving the customer’s problem unsolved and increasing the risk of churn.

The second tier is the expert escalation model, reserved for high-value accounts where the cost of failure is too great to risk customer loss or reputational damage. When all else fails, the ISP is forced to escalate. This requires dispatching an expert network engineer equipped with highly specialized, enterprise-grade hardware.

While this specialist approach can eventually find the root cause, the model itself is operationally and financially unsustainable. These specialized devices cost thousands of dollars each and require significant training for thousands of ISP troubleshooting technicians and installation teams, making them economically unfeasible to deploy at scale. More importantly, they are what we call ‘data-rich, but insight-poor.’ Many of these tools provide complex RF data that requires an expert to interpret—not a simple, actionable recommendation.

Furthermore, these tools are not designed for autonomous testing of network performance; they are only useful when a technician is physically on-site, making it nearly impossible to diagnose the intermittent problems that frustrate customers and generate the most repeat truck rolls.

The fundamental challenges of large enterprise connectivity

ISPs aren’t the only ones struggling with the in-building connectivity problem. Enterprise faces a parallel challenge, where the stakes are measured in operational continuity and employee productivity. For large enterprises, this connectivity challenge is no longer just an IT issue—it’s a C-suite business problem, with a recent study finding that 70% of CEOs claim their network is slowing business growth.

Wi-Fi is now the backbone for enterprise environments. New network installations have moved to either wireless-first or wireless-only. This move concentrates all operational risk onto the Wi-Fi network, which is why visibility into the end-user experience is absolutely vital. This isn’t just about employee laptops and video calls; it’s about mission-critical systems: logistics scanners in a warehouse, medical devices in a hospital, and point-of-sale systems in retail. When Wi-Fi fails, business stops.

The shift to wireless-first and wireless-only networks has created a set of immense operational hurdles for IT leaders, both for their internal teams and their external partners:

• The Scale Challenge: Managing network performance across hundreds or thousands of distributed sites is an immense operational challenge.
• The Visibility Challenge: Central IT teams lack visibility into the real user experience at each site.
• The Expertise Challenge: IT directors face a constant, unsustainable choice: pull their highest-skilled network engineers into routine troubleshooting, or let frontline problems pile up and drag down productivity.

This leaves IT leaders and their partners grappling with critical, unanswered questions. They are left struggling to ensure a consistent quality of experience across all their locations and service providers. Without objective, real-world wireless throughput and RF performance data, enterprises are forced to guess which locations to prioritize for network upgrades. All the while, they must reckon with the true, and often uncalculated, cost of pulling their senior engineers—both internally and at their partner organizations—away from strategic projects.

Introducing Speedtest Pulse™

This new era of connectivity, rising consumer expectations, and the gap in current solutions is precisely why we built Speedtest Pulse. Pulse solves these fundamental industry challenges at a disruptive and scalable price point.

To bring that vision to life, we at Ookla looked to the unique combination of core capabilities across our business and solutions. We’ve combined the unmatched Wi-Fi expertise of Ekahau—the creators of the market-leading Sidekick 2 Wi-Fi diagnostic device—with the powerful performance and experience validation, and iconic ease-of-use of Speedtest.

We packed decades of network intelligence into a single device that fits in the palm of your hand. The result is Speedtest Pulse, a professional, pocket-sized device and software application built for ISP technicians and Enterprise IT teams who need a simple way to validate network installs, resolve Wi-Fi issues, and guarantee network performance.

• For ISPs, Pulse makes every technician their first line of defense against churn. It validates new installs and provides trusted proof to close trouble tickets on the first visit. This results in drastically reduced operational costs, fewer repeat truck rolls, and new sales opportunities.
• For IT teams across large enterprises, hospitals, universities, and more, Pulse provides a simple way to validate network health across complex environments without immediately escalating to specialist teams.

We built Pulse from the ground up as a next-generation diagnostic platform, precision-engineered for today’s Wi-Fi-centric environment. Our goal is simple: to provide technicians and IT teams with simple, actionable recommendations that help them quickly identify and fix in-home and enterprise Wi-Fi performance issues—all at a price point that enables fleetwide adoption.

Active Pulse: Validating New Installs and Resolving Trouble Tickets

Active Pulse mode is the technician’s primary tool for guaranteeing performance on every site visit, whether it’s a new installation or a service call. Active Pulse provides one-tap, smartphone-based validation that translates complex network data into clear, actionable recommendations. The workflow is designed to eliminate guesswork and provide definitive proof of performance:

Step 1: Verify the inbound service

Before assessing the customer’s Wi-Fi, the technician’s first step is to isolate the service delivery from the local network. The technician is guided to connect the Speedtest Pulse device directly to the customer’s modem or router using an Ethernet cable.

The technician then runs an initial test to verify the performance of the inbound wired connection, up to 1 Gbps. This establishes a trusted performance baseline, confirming the inbound ISP service is functioning properly before any potential Wi-Fi issues are investigated.

Step 2: Test the wireless network performance

Once the wired service is validated, the technician disconnects the Ethernet cable and uses the Pulse mobile app to verify and/or diagnose the Wi-Fi environment. The technician can verify wireless performance in multiple areas of a home or business.

Using the app, technicians tap to initiate a test that measures key wireless throughput performance metrics using the trusted Speedtest server network. Then, Pulse scans the RF environment to identify common Wi-Fi problems like channel congestion or weak coverage and can analyze client-specific connectivity issues.

Step 3: Receive simple, actionable recommendations

Instead of showing raw data, the Speedtest Pulse app provides easy-to-understand results and recommendations.

If an issue is detected, the Pulse software analyzes the network’s KPIs holistically and provides clear instructions for improvement, such as, “Reduce Wi-Fi Contention. Your network is on Channel 36, which is crowded…Action: Change radio setting to channel 149.”

This empowers technicians to diagnose and fix problems on the spot—quickly and efficiently, even for those without Wi-Fi expertise.

Step 4: Provide definitive proof of install performance or issue resolution

After addressing a customer’s issues, the technician can generate a standardized install performance or issue resolution report to provide the proof that consumers today are seeking.

For new installs, this report serves as an internal “Day-One Performance Baseline” and provides data-driven confidence that the network is deployed consistently. It also directly addresses the growing number of customers who expect providers to prove whole-home or whole-business coverage, building customer trust and creating a positive first impression.

For troubleshooting tickets, this report provides definitive, trusted proof that the source of the customer complaint has been pinpointed and the issue has been resolved. It equips the technician with the actionable data needed to close the ticket in minutes, ending costly disputes  and validating for the customer that their network is now performing correctly.

A technician can typically complete a full diagnostic workflow—which includes an initial wired test to baseline the inbound service and multiple subsequent Wi-Fi tests in key locations—in approximately 5-10 minutes.

Continuous Pulse: Autonomous Testing Capabilities

When a technician visits a home or business to troubleshoot connectivity, that visit captures only a single moment in time. This leaves ISPs and IT teams struggling with a two-part visibility gap: they lack the real-world data to proactively assess long-term network health, and they struggle to diagnose problems they cannot replicate on site.

This gap has forced the industry into a reactive, “squeaky wheel” support model, where resources are only dispatched after a customer is already frustrated. This drives up costs with repeat truck rolls, leaves tickets unresolved, and damages customer confidence.

Intermittent issues that can’t be reproduced during a site visit are among the toughest challenges ISPs and IT teams face. They drive repeat truck rolls, unresolved tickets, and lead to even more frustrated customers. Historically, there hasn’t been a cost-effective way to capture and resolve these elusive problems. 

Speedtest Pulse’s Continuous mode, slated for release in 2026, solves this problem directly. As an affordable leave-behind testing tool, Pulse’s Continuous mode captures performance data over time and provides the conclusive evidence needed to finally close lingering tickets and restore customer confidence. Unlike internal monitoring tools that only show the network’s perspective, Pulse measures performance from the client device’s perspective, providing the trusted real-world data needed to measure service quality. With Continuous Pulse, organizations can:

• Leave the device behind: Continuous Pulse is a “leave-behind” mode that operates as a standalone device for long-term, autonomous data collection without requiring a mobile app for ongoing operation.
• Capture long-term trends: Continuous mode establishes clear performance baselines and makes it possible to detect degradation before it impacts end users.
• Diagnose elusive problems: By running consistent tests over time, Pulse provides the evidence needed to identify and address intermittent problems that traditional tools can miss.
• Integrate with existing systems: Data from Continuous Pulse feeds directly into Speedtest Insights™ and can be incorporated into existing network performance and assurance platforms.

Continuous Pulse mode provides the long-term, client-side visibility needed to catch intermittent issues early and cut down on repeat visits. In effect, Speedtest Pulse acts as the canary in the coal mine to identify underperforming networks. For large organizations, this allows IT leaders to stop guessing and deploy their expert resources (like senior engineers and specialized tools) only to the locations where their expertise will have the greatest impact. For customers using Speedtest Certified—our data-driven network certification for properties—Continuous mode will further enrich the certification by providing ongoing performance measurements.

The Power of the Ookla Ecosystem

The launch of Speedtest Pulse marks the start of a new chapter in how organizations approach network troubleshooting and validation. For ISPs, Pulse provides the scalable, easy-to-use, and insight-driven tool they need to fix the broken, two-tiered operational support model currently in place. Pulse empowers every technician to solve top wireless complaints on the first visit and drastically lower operational costs. And for Enterprises, Pulse delivers the outside-in visibility needed to solve scale and expertise challenges, empowering frontline IT personnel to validate network health across distributed sites.

Data from Speedtest Pulse will seamlessly integrate with Speedtest Insights, our centralized network intelligence platform, and/or can be integrated with existing experience and performance management systems. To build a truly comprehensive picture, data from Pulse can be used in conjunction with other products, including:

• Speedtest Certified: The data-driven network certification for properties that proves on-site network excellence.
• Speedtest: Leverage insights from 11 Million daily consumer-initiated tests.
• Downdetector: Real-time problem and outage monitoring for early alerting on service issues.
• Speedtest Embedded: Integrate Speedtest functionality into on-premise CPEs and other connected devices for network monitoring.
• Speedtest SDK: Integrate Speedtest testing into any mobile application for performance insights.

Speedtest Pulse is the new, crucial piece of our holistic vision to collect and analyze data from all sources in the Ookla data ecosystem. Together, they provide a 360-degree view of the connected experience that is unmatched in the industry. Contact us to learn how Speedtest Pulse can help your organization.