Two thirds of UK businesses experienced internet connection failures in the last 12 months, resulting in a cost of £12.3bn in lost productivity and overtime.
According to new research conducted by Beaming and the specialist business ISP, 72% of businesses – approximately 3.9 million enterprises – experienced internet downtime during working hours in the year to 31 March 2016, clocking up 149 million hours of internet downtime between them. The companies affected suffered 43 hours of lost connectivity and losses of £3,125 each on average, the equivalent of £521 per employee.
Email was the most important internet tool used by the businesses studied, with 81% of respondents saying that they relied on it to stay fully operational. Half of businesses (51%) use the internet to carry voice traffic, while around a third said they needed a consistent connection to access mission critical applications in the cloud (36%), online sales tools (34%) and for communication with their mobile workforce (33%).
Beaming managing director Sonia Blizzard comments: “The internet is the greatest business resource ever invented, but our increasing reliance on connectivity creates new risks for those that need it the most. The pace of business is now such that any downtime means missed opportunities, lost productivity and a huge amount of stress as businesses race to get back on track. It is only when businesses experience a problem that they find their large, consumer orientated broadband provider expects them to self-cure problems online or queue for hours on the phone to gain assistance.”
