Consumers are increasingly concerned about buffering and dropouts, especially where broadband networks are densest and most complex. That’s according to RtBrick, a company that makes multiservice edge routing software.

A survey by the company found that 70% of respondents experience dropout and buffering issues on their broadband connections. The users impacted mainly employ their broadband connections for video streaming, video conferencing, gaming and working from home. Of these, 8% have buffering issues more than once a day.

The broadband user profiles most prone to buffering are fast-growing suburban neighborhoods and homes in which several latency-sensitive applications are running at once.

Thirty-two percent of respondents have problems at least once per week, and 15% see them daily. The study found that 37% say they trust their broadband provider to have a reliable connection. And about the same percentage (38%) say they would pay extra for service that doesn’t experience these issues.

A key finding of the study is that 27% respondents in homes served by fiber experience problems, which is far better than the 47% of satellite customers having difficulty.

“This data is proof of the deepening structural problem with U.S. broadband networks,” RtBrick Founder and CEO Pravin Bhandarkar, said in a press release about the buffering study.

“As internet usage becomes more complex, legacy network infrastructure can’t provide the reliability consumers now expect at the cost points they can afford. Operators must modernize their architectures with network disaggregation if they hope to build customer satisfaction and a competitive edge.”

The bottom line of the report is that the nature of emerging applications require an approach to broadband that can provide service that goes beyond a fast overall speed. It must also provide data consistently, which is a related but separate capability. This should be an overall consideration in planning broadband deployments.

The nationwide survey was conducted for RtBrick for Obsurvant. It was in the field in April and reached 5,040 consumers.