Study Claims Poor Home Broadband and Mobile Hampers Remote Working

A new Opinium survey of 2,006 “nationally representative” UK adults has claimed that 25% of UK employees have had issues with their broadband or mobile services when working from home over the last year and 46% of those have experienced such severe problems that they’ve given up on it.

The uSwitch commissioned study noted that some 43% of UK employees responded to say that they had worked from home at least once (17% of those who remote work said they “always work from home“), which is partly thanks to the growing number of businesses that offer increasingly flexible work environments, and this figure rises to 55% amongst those aged 18-34.

Generally home workers are most likely to use their broadband connection to email colleagues or clients (76%), research and browse the internet (69%), share files via the cloud (39%) and stay in touch via Skype (34%).

However the fact that a quarter of respondents have suffered problems while trying to remote work is a concern. Apparently the most common complaint amongst home working internet users was having broadband speeds that were “simply too slow for them to work effectively” (32%), while 18% have suffered from an intermittent connection.

As a result of this some 30% of respondents found that they were unable to send a large file to their clients or colleagues and 9% were on a conference call when it cut out. Meanwhile 32% of Mobile users complained that their reception was patchy, while 11% couldn’t get any reception at all in their home.

The study claims that workers have spent a combined £190 million (total spend on finding alternative ways to work around poor broadband or mobile reception) over the last year on alternative measures to ensure they had consistent access to internet and phone services. For example, some visited a local cafe to access WiFi (16%), while others purchased a signal booster (16%) or switched provider to improve their service (17%).

Sadly 25% of respondents ended up having to work late to make up for the lost time and 20% said they have lost a work opportunity or some business due to shoddy service.

At this point it would have been useful to know the urban vs rural split of the survey, as well as some details on which connectivity / package types were being used for the broadband side of things. It’s interesting to note that, for mobile, respondents were also asked, “did you check your network’s coverage map before signing up to their service, to check the indoor signal in your area?” and 55% said no.