Broadband outages hitting UK’s home workers have cost the economy £1.3 billion over the past year, according to the annual outages report from Uswitch.com, the comparison and switching service.
Nearly 11 million consumers were affected by an internet outage that left them offline for three hours or more in the last 12 months — with those working remotely bearing the brunt of service disruptions.
One in seven Brits (16%) who reported a significant outage say it stopped them from working[4], and those affected lost on average nearly two days of internet service during the year.
And with half of employees (51%) working from home at least once a week, internet problems are landing some in their boss’s bad books, with one in ten (10%) admitting they had faced questions or comments regarding the quality of their broadband connection.
Yet one in eight people (13%) say the cost-of-living crisis means they have to work from home more often – regardless of their broadband’s reliability – to save money.
When tackling important projects, 10% of workers said they were more likely to go into the office as they didn’t trust their home connection, while 8% felt they had missed out on jobs or promotions due to unreliable broadband.
Nottingham is the UK’s outage capital with residents who experienced service disruptions spending the longest time offline over the course of a year and losing 9.2 million hours of broadband annually. The city was followed by Southampton and Manchester.
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