Beaming worked with research company Opinium, a mathematician from Imperial College and more than 500 businesses using a range of internet providers and connectivity services to understand and quantify the impact of internet outages on UK businesses and the wider economy.
It found that 72 per cent 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.
Impact of downtime on UK economy
While more than one in ten businesses (13 per cent) manage internet outages by switching to alternative connections and a quarter (25 per cent) mitigate some downtime by moving to non-internet related tasks, day-to-day operations grind to a halt at more than a third of businesses (38 per cent) when their internet connection fails. A quarter (23 per cent) of business studied said that they were forced to remain open for longer to catch up with time lost due to outages.
13 per cent of businesses studied said they started losing money immediately in the event of an outage. The proportion of firms suffering a financial impact rises to more than a quarter after an hour (28 per cent) without connectivity and almost half (46 per cent) after four hours.
Large and medium-sized businesses lose the fewest productive hours to internet downtime, however, their greater reliance on internet technologies and the inability of most to switch to alternative connections quickly in the event of an outage mean they lose a greater proportion of their revenues than smaller companies for every hour of outage they experience.
Connection habits of UK businesses
Beaming’s research showed that businesses relying on consumer internet services suffered double the downtime (30 hours on average) experienced by users of business connections (16 hours). Despite this, half (51 per cent) of micro businesses and 80 per cent of sole traders continue to use broadband services designed for home use.
Email was the most important internet tool used by the businesses studied, with 81 per cent of respondents saying that they relied on it to stay fully operational. Half of businesses (51 per cent) 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 per cent), online sales tools (34 per cent) and for communication with their mobile workforce (33 per cent).
Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming, 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.”
“Internet failures happen for all sorts of reasons, including equipment failures and malicious attacks. All businesses that use the internet should have a plan to ensure connectivity is restored quickly and that any disruption is minimised.The quality, reliability and consistency of service and the availability of technical support should be as important to business buyers as speed of service.
“Most connectivity problems can be fixed quickly by technical experts over the phone and even before they occur through proactive monitoring. Beaming provides all customers with a direct line into its technicians, enhanced security and proactive monitoring as standard, and have started offering the ability to switch immediately between diverse routes and technologies in the event of a service failure to ensure maximum uptime.”