“Not just a pipe”: Incognito talks ISP agility and value-added services

Speed on its own is no longer enough to keep broadband customers. At Connected Britain 2025, Incognito Software Systems’ senior marketing product manager Sonya Goodanetz said UK ISPs now need to compete on the services that run over the connection, not just on fibre and headline Mbps. She pointed to the rapid growth of value-added services, such as cybersecurity tools and traffic prioritisation for cloud gaming, as a way to stand out in a crowded market and lift average revenue per user.

According to Goodanetz, newer technology lets providers roll out these services much faster by deploying apps directly onto residential gateways, instead of the old model of testing agents on every device type over many months. She argued that operators must stop acting as “just a pipe” and use this agility to move into areas like healthcare and consumer IoT in the connected home, focusing on end-to-end quality of experience rather than raw speed alone.