{"id":31459,"date":"2022-06-28T09:00:21","date_gmt":"2022-06-28T08:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=31459"},"modified":"2022-06-28T08:43:37","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T07:43:37","slug":"three-uk-survey-claims-smes-losing-18-77bn-due-to-poor-connectivity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2022\/06\/three-uk-survey-claims-smes-losing-18-77bn-due-to-poor-connectivity.html","title":{"rendered":"Three UK Survey Claims SMEs Losing \u00a318.77bn Due to Poor Connectivity"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new survey of over 1,000 British Micro and SME businesses, which was commissioned by Three UK<\/a>, has warned that such firms (i.e. those who provide their employees with work phones) are losing out on an average of 1 hour of working time per employee per week due to poor connecting – costing them \u00a318.77bn a year.<\/p>\n

Loss of business revenue also has an impact on the British economy – an estimated loss of economic output (GVA) amounting to \u00a37.7bn every year. The research found that professional services firms were the hardest hit and lost \u00a35.3bn in revenue on average per year, accounting for an annual output loss of \u00a32.8bn to the economy, while the retail sector lost \u00a33.7bn in revenue per year because of poor technology, resulting in an annual loss of \u00a3560m in output to the British economy.<\/p>\n

NOTE:<\/strong> For medium-sized businesses, the problem equates to 250 hours of lost working time per week.<\/div>\n

The survey, which was conducted by YouGov and Development Economics, noted that “poor connectivity<\/em>” translates to situations where staff cannot get online or complete work effectively. But annoyingly, the study doesn’t dig very deeply into the issue of why such connectivity is considered to be “poor<\/em>” in the first place.<\/p>\n

Since the focus seems to be on “work phones<\/em>” (mobiles) and internet connectivity, then we assume the primary issue to be one of poor mobile broadband connectivity (signal reception). Signal coverage of the 4G<\/a> and 5G<\/a> services, as well as related network performance, will of course vary between different operators in different locations. As such, not even Three UK<\/a> has a magic fix for all of those core issues.<\/p>\n

Summary of Key Survey Results<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u27a4 71% of SMEs have been made more aware of areas where they need to reduce spending because of the cost of living crisis, with 32% believing they are paying too much for phone contracts and looking to cut costs.<\/p>\n

\u27a4 29% of SMEs are worried they could lose employees due to not having good technology, rising to 48% amongst medium-sized businesses.<\/p>\n

\u27a4 36% of SMEs believe they could perform better if they had “better mobile phone connectivity<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

\u27a4 20% of SMEs are concerned that not knowing how to use the latest mobile phone technology could allow their business to be left behind.<\/p>\n

\u27a4 48% of SMEs state that the “technology industry<\/em>” uses complex technical language that they don\u2019t understand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point it should go without saying that Three UK<\/a> has a vested interest in the study, thus its results need to be taken with a pinch of salt. However, if poor mobile connectivity is a big problem, then it might be worth the business considering Dual-SIM phones across two networks (preferably phones that support lots of radio bands) – ideally after looking at some coverage maps of signal reception in the areas they work (i.e. picking the two most complementary operators).<\/p>\n

The dynamic UK network coverage map from nPerf below, which is based off crowdsourced data from users of their app, might be one way to help pick the right operators. Admittedly, choosing a Dual-SIM approach does come with extra costs, so it’s often a question of whether that outweighs the impact from lost productivity.<\/p>\n