Freshwave Claims Better Indoor Mobile Signals Can Grow UK Economy by £70bn
Wireless infrastructure provider Freshwave, which is backed by investment firm DigitalBridge and naturally has its own vested interests in this field, have published a new study that claims a focus on improving indoor mobile (4G, 5G etc.) signals and “eliminating mobile dead zones” could help to grow the UK economy by £70bn a year.
According to Freshwave’s somewhat high-level Mobile Connectivity ROI Index, just 5 minutes of poor current connectivity a day reduces annual productive time by 1% and 87% of UK organisations say poor current connectivity causes “daily disruptions at their sites“. The value lost each year by poor current connectivity in the average UK organisation with more than 100 employees is said to be -£4.6m.
Overall, the study claims to have found that poor indoor mobile connectivity costs the UK economy £100bn annually. But respondents to the study believe better indoor mobile connectivity could reduce that impact by as much as 70%, equating to added value of £70bn per year across the UK economy.
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The public sector was found to be the most affected by indoor connectivity dead zones, losing £46bn annually, with potential gains of £33bn not being realised. The professional and financial services sector follows, losing £24bn annually, with a potential gain of £17bn from better indoor mobile connectivity. As the nation’s financial and governmental hub, London stands to gain the most from improved indoor mobile connectivity (£14bn), followed by the South East (£13bn) and the Midlands (£10bn).
The majority of respondents (62%) identified workforce productivity as being the primary beneficiary of improved indoor mobile connectivity. Not to mention other immediate gains from better indoor signal, such as financial performance (57%), operational efficiency (56%), and customer satisfaction (52%). Respondents also saw longer term benefits such as AI-driven use cases, automation use cases and personalised experiences.
Simon Frumkin, CEO of Freshwave, said:
“The UK economy simply cannot afford to lose £100bn every year. That is why massive investments have been made in digital infrastructure over the past decade. We must now build upon this platform and ensure seamless mobile connectivity extends to wherever people want to use it. The prize will be £70bn of added value for businesses, so it’s little wonder the majority expect to invest in mobile technology over the next two years.
Working alongside the UK’s mobile network operators, we’re at the forefront of helping businesses reap the full economic benefits of this decade-long investment. 4G/5G connectivity is going to enable transformative technologies across every sector, benefiting organisations and the economy both today and for years into the future.”
Admittedly, we always advise taking studies like this with a pinch of salt, not least since there are vested interests fuelling it and they tend to make a lot of assumptions about service coverage, performance and economic benefits, which may or may not accurately reflect reality.
On the other hand, there are clearly positives to be had and few people will complain about the arrival of indoor signal improvements, regardless of whether they can be directly proven to result in significant economic or other positive impacts.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Does Freshwave and Rachel Thieves from accounts share the same number guy?
Yawn. At least put a genuine criticism forwards instead of childish name-calling.
I don’t mind using my own network for WiFi calling but I would like Three to use it properly instead of forcing the phone to use a patchy 4G signal instead.
Why does the phrase ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics’ come to mind here. These sorts of figures are often quoted but I’ve yet to see any real meaningful change to the UK’s growth figures from improved mobile coverage.
Maybe because the mobile coverage hasn’t improved in any meaningful way? I’ve seen nothing but a decline over the past 6-8 years.
Yet another useless “research” nobody asked for, or are they trying to sell something?
The reality is that many build designs and their materials inhibit mobile signals and trying to address it is very expensive. Why would a large company invest in a dedicated network for mobile when a well designed WIFI solution (including resilience) would be multipurpose and can be made secure. They can even retrieve logs of access by location within the building.
Even at a low level small businesses can provide both Business and Guest SSID’s
With the increased availability of Full Fibre broadband businesses can easily now allow customer/guest access to visitors to their buildings without any impact on their business use. Yes people could copy/send data out from their office outside their internal network but this would apply equally by providing them with an internal mobile signal.
Why do people write such reports without any obligation to consider alternatives. Do they think all their customers are fools.
Since most phones & providers do voice over WIFI then in most cases it would only make a difference if it’s combined with poor fixed line capability surely?
There can be instances where WiFi calling doesn’t work, a lot of phones will prefer the mobile network if the signal strength is good enough.
I’ve seen it in places before where the network signal was good enough but it would cause calls to drop
Publishing research like this makes one doubt the authors. Figures such as these are impossible to verify but for most observers they lack credibility. My own 3000 sq ft home has 150+ Mbps in every room courtesy of a mesh WiFi system and WiFi calling enables me to make calls at the odd times the Vodafone 4G mast is playing up. Bumping my speed up to 1.6 Gbps is theoretically possible but would add not one penny to my productivity.
With outdoor dead spots and unusable
signal strength the norm for huge areas of the UK, improving indoors strength articles really do take the biscuit for many.
The UK mobile (clue is in the name) network is or is becoming 3rd world by comparison to many countries. For those who travel regularly, it’s now very very noticeable when you turn on your mobile when you touchdown.
This is kind of why I perfer the idea of an open access femtocell type device but the ship sailed along-time ago on that idea.