Moving From Network Complexity to Clarity
Regional Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are the backbone of broadband delivery, often serving the hard-to-reach communities that larger carriers overlook.
However, operating outside the Tier 1 behemoths (e.g. AT&T, Comcast) presents a unique set of challenges, particularly when it comes to managing the complexity of diverse networks and competing on customer experience.
For these independent operators, maximizing efficiency and minimizing operational friction are not just goals, they’re necessities for survival and growth.
Preseem co-founder and CEO Dan Siemon recently appeared on Broadband Communities’ Beyond the Cable podcast with host Brad Randall to discuss the core challenges and the path forward for regional ISPs.
Dan spoke about how Preseem works directly with regional ISPs to simplify their operations, cut support costs, and enhance the subscriber experience. Read on for a recap of the conversation, or listen to the full podcast here.
Key Takeaways
- Customer experience is the competitive advantage: Regional ISPs can’t match Tier 1 marketing budgets, so they must win on service quality and local support, areas where they naturally excel.
- Vendor complexity kills efficiency: Managing multiple vendor interfaces creates massive operational friction, slowing support teams and preventing holistic network visibility.
- Proactive operations drive ROI: One large operator reduced their RF analytics team by a third (re-deploying those employees elsewhere in the organization), while another cut support tech onboarding from eight weeks to three weeks.
- Churn prevention requires data: Most customers won’t complain before leaving, they’ll just switch providers. Waiting for complaints means it’s already too late.
- Access technology doesn’t affect behavior: Real-world data shows subscribers on 100 Mbps fiber behave the same as those on 100 Mbps fixed wireless, meaning the delivery method doesn’t seem to matter.
The Twin Challenges: Competition and Complexity
When asked about the most significant challenges regional ISPs face, Dan identified two critical factors.
“One is competition with those Tier 1s. (Regional ISPs) don’t have the advantages, the huge marketing budgets, the giant brand that crosses the whole country, and the recognition elsewhere,” he explained. “So that means they end up needing to compete more on customer experience, both on the service delivery itself and also on their local sales and service.”
But competition is only part of the story. The second challenge cuts deeper into daily operations.
“Any operator that gets to a decent size is going to end up with many different vendors in their network, maybe they’re doing some fiber, they’re doing some fixed wireless, maybe they’re doing some cable,” Dan said.
“They don’t have the advantages of scale of the large providers, either. So, a large provider might build a whole bunch of tools internally, amortize that cost across a million subscribers; that’s really difficult for a smaller operator to do. So they end up suffering under the weight of either building their own tools in a non-cost-effective way or just having to deal with so many different vendors all the time in their day-to-day operations.”
This vendor complexity creates a hidden operational burden, Dan said.
“If your support team has to learn three or four different UIs just to help a customer, or your network operations team doesn’t have a holistic view of the network, and they need to jump into a whole bunch of different equipment to figure out ‘where should I go spend my time next,’ that slows things down.”
The Solution: Normalization and Proactive Operations
Dan explained that Preseem’s approach tackles these challenges on two levels.
“The first thing is we look at the actual traffic in the network, and we figure out what parts of the network are delivering a poor experience,” he said. “I think of this as a little bit like a floodlight across the network where you can see in high resolution where the problems are.”
The second area is Preseem’s built-in integrations with access network equipment across multiple vendors—including Cambium, Tarana, and Ubiquiti in fixed wireless, and Calix and Adtran in fiber—that collect large amounts of data into a single interface.
“We bring all that (data) back and we normalize it, so the day-to-day interactions with the network can happen at this more abstract level, and you don’t necessarily have to use each one of those (vendor) tools,” Dan said.
Real-World Impact: Cutting Training and Onboarding Time
The results speak for themselves. For example, Dan shared compelling examples of operational transformation.
“Being able to have that global list to know which of your customers have, not only the worst connection, but are having the biggest impact on the network, it directly indicates where you need to go to spend your time to make things better. And this is a general theme of our platform, we’re trying to make operations more proactive,” he said.
“So by being able to understand (where the problems are) and know what to go fix, which APs are in pain, which CPE Radios are in pain, we’ve had a large operator be able to cut their team that was focused on RF analytics basically down a third. And they were able to redeploy those people into the rest of their network operations instead of looking at an AP UI all day and trying to figure out which APs were in trouble.”
Perhaps even more striking is the impact on support team onboarding, which Preseem reduced by over 60% for one customer, as Dan explained.
“We have a customer that has a very large support team, and onboarding people is very complex because they have to learn how to use the different UIs for the different AP vendors, and then the fiber vendors, and they ended up having a situation where it would take them eight weeks to get one support tech productive when they joined the team,” he said.
“When they switched to using Preseem as a starting point for their support, they were able to reduce that down to three weeks. And again, it’s because they didn’t need to learn all the details of all these different systems to be productive.”
The Co$t of Inaction
For regional ISPs that don’t embrace data-driven operations, the consequences are clear.
“If you can’t spot what parts of the network are delivering a bad experience and proactively make them better, your churn is just going to be higher,” Dan warned.
“The vast majority of customers, maybe they’ll complain once, but often they’re just going to leave. They’re never going to call to tell you it’s bad, so if you’re relying on customer complaints to figure out where the problems are, you’re probably already too late.”
Dan continued: “On the operations efficiency side, if you don’t have data and you don’t know what to go fix and when, and how bad it is, you’re just spending so much time trying to find those problems, searching for a needle in a haystack instead of being able to say ‘OK, those are the problems, I’m just going to go address them,’ and then get out front. So ultimately that just means higher operations costs, bigger support teams, bigger network operations teams than you’d otherwise need.”
Surprising Data on Subscriber Behavior
The conversation moved on to Preseem’s annual ISP Network Report, which reveals fascinating insights about how subscribers actually use their connections, Dan said.
“A subscriber that’s on a 100 Mbps fiber plan or a 100 Mbps fixed wireless plan, they actually don’t behave any differently. So it’s really not about the medium that’s delivering it, they actually behave the same,” Dan noted.
Even more interesting: “Once you get past about a 30 Mbps plan, people’s usage does not change. 25, 30 Mbps across any access technology actually seems to be what’s needed, even though people end up buying a lot more than that. You really don’t see much of a difference in terms of bandwidth during peak or monthly usage on, say, a 500 Mbps plan versus a 100 Mbps plan.”
Download the 2026 ISP Network Report
Why Regional ISPs Matter
When asked why it’s important for regional ISPs to survive and thrive, Dan’s answer was both personal and practical.
“These providers, they’re fundamentally good for their communities,” he said. “These companies tend to have all of their operations, like marketing, sales, and network operations, much closer to their customers. So that’s local economic activity. If it was all served by just the big Tier 1s, all the jobs are in the big cities, they’re not in the rest of the country.”
“Our mission is to help regional ISPs be successful, and the way that we can help do that is by building the tools that maybe just don’t scale to build yourself as an operator,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to see these companies grow and thrive, and hopefully be there along that ride with them.”
To hear more from Dan on additional topics such as the evolution of AI, fixed wireless and fiber industry trends, and more, listen to his full conversation with Beyond the Cable here.
