ISP Onecom Claims Poor Broadband Costs UK SMEs £3,351 Each

A new survey of 208 small and medium sized UK enterprises, which was conducted during May 2019 by Consumer Intelligence on behalf of broadband ISP Onecom, has claimed that poor internet services cost them on average £3,351 each in lost business over the past 3 years (22% of SMEs estimate their losses at over £5,000 each).

Sadly the ISP, which seems likely to have a vested interest in presenting itself as a better alternative, doesn’t delve very far into the detail of where the lost business came from or how such figures were calculated at source (instead there’s a general reference to slow speeds and poor reliability). However we do get at least a little bit of extra context.

Overall 37% of SMEs rate the internet service they receive today as “average or poor“, which helps explain why 39% are looking to switch ISPs over the next 12 months (take note that aspirations to switch in surveys like this are often much higher than actual observed switching in the market). Meanwhile 32% put this down to being based in rural areas where the connections are poor, while 23% blamed their ISP and 22% say it’s the fault of the service company that selected them.

Ben Dowd, Onecom CEO, said:

“SMEs are the lifeblood of the UK economy, and, as a medium sized business ourselves we clearly understand the landscape that sees them being held back by a lack of digital infrastructure. Our research shows that a dropped or disrupted internet signal can clearly have a significant and lasting impact for an SME and as more business is carried out online, strong connectivity is essential.”

At this point it’s worth considering that not all internet connectivity faults can be attributed to the ISP and some will invariably stem from a problem within the Local Area Network (LAN) environment. The above survey doesn’t completely rule that out as a cause via their questioning.

Equally any business that is reliant upon a working broadband or Ethernet service would be well advised to consider what redundancy measures they have in place for when their main link fails. Outages are inevitable and so it’s essential to have some sort of separate solution ready for when they occur (e.g. Satellite, 4G, ADSL or whatever can act as an emergency backup / failover).

Cost to SMEs of Poor Broadband (Survey Results)