GWS Ranks 33 UK Cities for Business Based Mobile Network Use

A new study by Global Wireless Solutions (GWS) has examined mobile network (mobile broadband) performance for business connectivity across 33 UK cities, which among other things attempts to identify the best one for remote working. Overall Liverpool came top, while London only managed to rank 25th and Dumfries was bottom.

The study involved GWS engineers collecting 936,249 data and voice task tests on iOS and Android devices during Q4 2019, which was conducted alongside nationwide business research polling in early 2020 of over 200 businesses (ranging from 100 employees to over 5,000 through Vanson Bourne).

The GWS Business OneScore evaluation process then measured network performance by taking into consideration voice, data, video, coverage and reliability metrics, based on what’s important to businesses. Overall the results claim to have found that operators are “meeting customer expectations on mobile network speed” over 96% of the time, but a lack of “great coverage” is still claimed to be impacting business productivity.

Summary of Key Findings

* 75% of businesses agreed that completing various online activities in 4 to 6 seconds (e.g. loading news and other websites) was an acceptable length of time to wait.

* Only 18% of businesses cited speed as a common complaint.

* 75% of businesses claim that, as a result of their organisation not receiving excellent mobile coverage, employee productivity suffers.

* 45% of businesses consider having reliable and adequate connectivity to enable more employees to work from home, as a priority for mobile telecoms over the next 12 months.

* 39% of businesses said their employees have complained about mobile network coverage, closely followed by dropped calls (28%). In addition, 53% of businesses said they would like to see more consistent voice call accessibility and quality from their operator.

* 77% of businesses make and receive traditional phone calls daily.

* Voice quality, calls connecting and network coverage were the top three most important network performance considerations for businesses.

As for the mobile network testing itself, GWS only provides a very vague ranking and doesn’t offer any useful details on the results for each city or by each mobile network operator.

Figure 1. GWS Business OneScore Rankings