1 in 8 UK Workplaces Lose Internet Connectivity Once a Day or More
A new survey of 1,000 UK office workers, which was conducted by business broadband ISP Glide, has claimed that 5% of businesses suffer multiple internet outages each day and 12% lose connectivity at least once a day. Respondents added that the average time to reconnect was 107 minutes.
The study also found that Glasgow seems to be the worst for office connection stability, with 26% of workers claiming their business internet goes down at least once a day. This was followed by Bristol (20%), Southampton (18%), London (14%) and Cardiff (13%).
Perhaps unsurprisingly those who work in the IT sector were the least likely to experience a loss of connectivity, with 40% even saying their business has never lost its connection (compared with 30% overall). Some 38% of those in HR and recruitment said the same and so did 36% of self-employed workers.
Meanwhile legal workers (solicitors) were the most likely to have crappy internet connections and 14% claim to have lost access multiple times a day.
Ben King, CTO of Glide, said:
“It’s shocking to see just how many hours a year workers are losing due to the internet being down. With millions of offices across the country dependent on an internet connection to run, it really is worth investing in a fast, reliable and assured network to support your business needs.”
Glide obviously has a vested interest here (take with pinch of salt) and it’s worth noting that one underlying problem may be the lack of redundancy in such businesses (i.e. ensuring that a backup connection exists, ideally via a separate network from your primary link). Simply installing an ultrafast fibre line doesn’t make your business immune to outages.
Even the smallest businesses can have redundant connections, such as through something as simple as a 4G mobile broadband link (coverage allowing). One other possible caveat in a survey like this is that office workers might easily confuse local network problems with a fault on the internet connection itself.
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 and Linkedin.
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1 in 8 lose Internet connectivity every day for an average of an hour and three quarters.
I find this somewhat difficult to believe.
I agree CarlT, I’m somewhat pulling odd faces at the moment. Seems very questionable to me and not inline with data we have from thousands our of circuits.
That’s more polite than what I said reading this!
Classic ‘the networks down’. Complete nonsense.
Link to survey results please.
“It’s shocking to see just how many hours a year workers are losing due to the internet being down. With millions of offices across the country dependent on an internet connection to run, it really is worth investing in a fast, reliable and assured network to support your business needs.”
or a good network manager.
Or a good ISP. Like Glide? Makes you wonder if these figures aren’t just trying to sell stuff to people.
A survey of 1000 office workers. So it’s probably made up mostly of people who have no idea what they’re doing. “The Internet is down” = “I accidentally turned off my wifi”, or “I accidentally pulled out the network cable”
The 1 in 8 seem a bit suspicious, I own and operate a business with office/branches in 15 locations all over the UK each site expect for one is using a Virgin Media Business line.
The connection is each location is monitored 24 hour using ping to check if connection is still up.
Can’t say I’ve seen the daily internet connection lost.
I think some of the issue are some businesses cheap out instead of getting a business line which has a SLA they just use normal home broadband I’ve been to few offices and seen a BT home hub.
The idea of lawyers tolerating that kind of downtime is pretty crazy too. When I work with legal firms the tolerance of network downtime is extremely low.