Survey Claims 21.7 Million UK People Hit by Broadband Outages

A new Opinium survey of 2,000 UK adults, which was commissioned by Uswitch, has claimed that over 21.7 million people experienced “broadband outages” of 3 or more hours over the last year – double 2022’s figure of over 11m. This stopped 15% of respondents from working and is estimated to cost the economy £2bn (lost productivity).

The survey noted that 25% of respondents had been left without internet connectivity for almost a full week or more, yet only 22% received compensation from their ISP and 48% weren’t aware that Ofcom’s rules may entitle them to compensation. But we should caveat that the regulator’s Automatic Compensation system is voluntary (only supported by some providers) and only applies in certain conditions (e.g. if the outage lasts longer than 2 working days).

Elsewhere, some 73% of respondents said they found such service outages frustrating (that’s surely a given) and the issue ranks above roadworks (72%) and delays to public transport (70%) on the table of consumer frustrations. The only issues that came higher were rude customer service (82%) and queue-jumping (82%).

The city of Southampton in Hampshire (England) was found to be the UK’s worst for outages, with residents who experienced service disruptions spending the longest time offline over the course of a year – racking up an average downtime per resident of 63 hours! By comparison, capital city London said that its average “broadband outage” was typically less than 14 hours.

Top UK Cities for Broadband Outages in 2022-23

1. Southampton – 63 hours

2. Newcastle – 57 hours

3. Birmingham 47 hours

4. Liverpool – 44 hours

5. Nottingham – 33 hours

Naturally, we have a few comments on this, not least of which is the fact that we haven’t actually seen any hard evidence from other sources to corroborate that people are suffering double the amount of broadband service outages to a year ago (in fairness, it’s a difficult thing to study with any accuracy). But a change that big is something we’re usually well positioned to notice and, so far, we haven’t.

On top of that, more reliable full fibre (FTTP) networks have grown in both UK coverage and take-up, while more people are now back working from an office than their home (i.e. fewer people were at home to spot when outages occur). So if anything the outage figures should be coming down and not rising sharply.

At the time of writing we still haven’t seen uSwitch’s full results and methodology, although we do recall that last year’s report rather tediously decided to include “power cuts” as one of the options on their survey for causing such outages (it’s still included this time too). We felt that was a bit unfair, as anybody with a fairly small battery backup (AC power bank / UPS) unit would be able to bring their connection back. Mains power cuts are NOT usually the fault of broadband ISPs.

The other issue typically stems from whether a “broadband outage” is actually caused by an internet provider or is instead an issue within the home, such as a local network, viruses / hacker, router, Wi-Fi or end-user device problem. Surveys like this often can’t correctly distinguish the difference, which tends to result in everything being blamed on internet providers, while the wider picture is often far more complex.

However, modern broadband networks themselves can still be disrupted in all sorts of different ways, such as via weather damage (flooding, fallen trees etc.), third-party street works cutting through cables, fires, power cuts at the exchange and deeper faults within an ISP’s network (e.g. hardware failure, routing / peering or DNS mistakes etc.). Most of these are resolved within minutes or hours, but others can take days or even longer (complex incidents in remote rural areas are usually slower to resolve).

UPDATE 8:35am

We’ve just got access to the full survey, which in the small print does at least ask whether the respondents have “lost your broadband connection or had it drop out for any of the following reasons in the past 12 months?” – 35% of those who had experienced disconnections selected ‘My broadband provider had an outage’, while 22% selected ‘Router was not working’ and 13% selected ‘Routine maintenance to cables external to my property’.

We’ve also noticed that this year’s survey sample of 2,000 adults is half the size of last year’s (4,000). Typically, the bigger the sample size, the more accurate it is.