Businesses across the UK are losing as much as one hour of operational time every week because of poor network infrastructure, new research from fibre provider Geo has revealed.
The firm spoke to IT and network professionals from private and public sector organisations across the UK and found that 70% of businesses reported losing out on at least one hour of operational time per week to poor network performance with 30% of these losing one day or more every week.
Faulty or slow Internet access caused 2% of UK business to actually lose a customer while 27% believe the potential is there for them to lose customers.
Geo estimates that poor network performance could be costing the UK economy millions of pounds every year.
Respondents believe it is not workers using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter that is causing the congestion on corporate networks but the sheer volume of business that now takes place online, the report said. Just under 10% of respondents blamed HD video tools such as telepresence and web conferencing as contributing to network drain.
“These disturbing results call into question many telcos’ claims that they provide businesses with the 99.999 percent uptime to trade effectively,” said Mark Ryder, director of enterprise for Geo. “Moreover, the news that faults and slowdowns do erode relationships between businesses and their customers suggests that UK enterprises must act to resolve this now.”
