21815 - SCTE Broadband Feb2023 COMPLETE v3

47 Vol. 45 No. 1 - February 2023 Issue answers to Question 4 (“Do you think all companies should publish information about the energy efficiency?”), younger decision makers are more likely to take a supplier’s stance on environmental sustainability into account when selecting a vendor to work with. Their answers are 7-8% above the averages of (a)-(c). Again, this signals a positive outlook for the future. Question 8: What are your company’s priorities over the next 5 years in the UK marketplace? The respondents’ companies do not stand out in terms of their business priorities. The graphic outlines their collective top four priorities. Question 9: What is most important to you when choosing an equipment vendor or broadband services provider? Respondents could provide multiple answers. Although the percentages of individual answers do not vary a lot, and no individual answer stands out, the importance of the sustainability policy ranks third with 41% of respondents indicating it as a decisive factor. The answers appear to depend on the respondents’ ages: the relative importance of the first three criteria decreases with age. One might just speculate that the amount of experience accumulated with age reduces the importance of service and support, and that the falling importance of price may be attributed to a standard of living that usually improves with age. Although vendors’ sustainability policy ranks the third in all age groups, it seems to be relatively more important to the younger respondents. The importance of vendors’ sustainability policy is not evenly distributed to respondents across the UK. Yorkshire and the Humber leads with 57%, followed by Wales with 53%. The West Midlands and Northern Ireland come next with 47% each; however, sustainability policy ranks first in the West Midlands and second in Northern Ireland. At the other end of the scale, only 10% of respondents selected the sustainability policy as the most important in the North West of England, with it ranking last. What else have we learnt? In addition to our findings above, other notable observations can be made. While age has been identified as important, the results show no significant difference regarding answers from both genders of respondents. In geographical terms, likewise, no particular UK regions seem to be against environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, considering the consistency across various answers, the respondents from the South West, East of England, Wales and Scotland gave consistently positive answers, while the answers from the South East appeared to be consistently negative. From the other UK regions, respondents from the Northern Ireland and the West Midlands hold the swinging status with exhibited inconsistency. from the industry For more information, email marketing@snt-iskratel.si Sustainability I N F O C U S