UK businesses lost over 50 million hours and £3.7 billion due to internet failures in 2023, according to a new report from Beaming, a specialist business ISP. Reliance on connectivity for trading and operational activities has increased among businesses in the last five years, and the cost of missed sales, lost productivity and other disruptions due to downtime has risen by 400%.

Beaming’s report – The Cost of Downtime: The Impact of Outages on UK Businesses in 2023 – shares its analysis of a Censuswide survey of businesses using connectivity from various internet service providers, and advice to help companies reduce downtime levels and costs. The report reveals that:

Cumulatively, UK businesses experienced 8.8 million internet failures and 50.5 million hours of disruptive downtime in 2023, where the ability to trade or access vital services was impaired.
The amount of time businesses lost to connectivity failures in 2023 was a fifth lower than in 2018 when previous Beaming research found that firms lost 60 million hours to downtime. However, the cost of that downtime has increased fivefold: from £742 million in 2018 to £3.7 billion in 2023. 
Heightened dependence on connectivity for communication, e-commerce and access to cloud applications means 15% of UK businesses, some 850,000 nationwide, would now start losing money the moment their connectivity fails. This is 81,000 more firms than five years ago. 
During 8-hour internet outages – a standard working day – 39% of businesses now would lose money. This compares to 34% at the end of 2018 and represents an increase of 240,000 companies nationwide.
The median time for financial losses to kick in from internet failures is 6 hours for businesses with employees today. This applies to employers of all sizes, from micro-companies with 2 to 10 employees to big companies with more than 250 staff members. 
SMEs bore the brunt of internet disruptions in 2023, enduring an average of 3 to 4 failures and 19 hours of downtime each. Those working a standard 8-hour day and 5-day week lose more than two working days a year to downtime, around 1% of their productive time.
The hospitality, IT, and manufacturing sectors experienced the highest levels of internet downtime and the biggest financial impact. On average, hospitality businesses lost 27 hours to downtime in 2023, while companies in the IT industry lost an estimated £555 million to connectivity failures.

Sonia Blizzard, Managing Director of Beaming, said: “The adoption of digital technologies has been a lifeline for business survival and a driver for increased prosperity in recent years, but this has come with a heightened dependence on connectivity. Companies are demanding more of their connectivity than ever before, and those relying on e-commerce, automation and public cloud services then incur the highest costs due to internet downtime.”

“Greater use of faster, stronger, more resilient forms of connectivity has helped reduce downtime, whilst downtime has become much more costly. Good planning, higher capacity services and expert support are vital now to reduce the risk of internet failure and the associated financial fallout.” 

Interview

At Connected America 2024, we spoke with Yigal Elbaz, SVP and Network CTO at AT&T (pictured, left) about the future of Open RAN and what it means for the operator

At the end of last year, AT&T announced an enormous $14 billion Open RAN deal with Ericsson, a deal Elbaz describes as “one of the most courageous and important collaborations that I can remember in our industry”.

The deal marks the largest commitment to Open RAN architecture by any brownfield operator to date, highlighting the technology’s growing maturity and technical progress.

“I’m very encouraged by the state of Open RAN in our industry,” said Elbaz, noting a steady increase in momentum with Tier 1 operators. “We’re getting to the point where we can get parity in terms of what we can get out of a CPU-based platform, in terms of energy and capacity. We’re seeing the ecosystem building more chipsets that can be used in radios, as well as more radio vendors willing to participate and build products.”

He explained that AT&T’s Open RAN strategy focusses on four key pillars:

Open hardware, with Elbaz noting that AT&T is aiming for “70% of our traffic to flow through open hardware by 2026”;
Migration to cloud RAN, a process that is already underway, with the first activation of cloud RAN with Ericsson on a 5G commercial network last month;
The introduction of 3rd party radios;
And the development of a unified service management and orchestration (SMO) platform that all vendors can connect to.

“If we can work with one management system that lots of vendors can connect with, that gives us a lot of operational flexibility,” he explained.

Taken together, Elbaz argues that this strategy will allow the company to move towards a state of continuous innovation, uninhibited by the typically cyclical nature of RAN upgrades.

“We’re a tipping point [for Open RAN],” he explained. “Eventually, from an operator point of view […] the value for us will be more players, more innovation, more competition. But we’re also getting to a point where we can evolve the network with just the push of software. The transition is not going to be overnight, but we’re finally at the point where the industry is starting to look at Open RAN and say ‘this is the right time for us’.”

“As an industry, we’re going to stop thinking about the universe in 5- or 10-year windows and actually move towards continuous innovation and continuous progress when it comes to wireless systems,” he added. “Networks will increasingly look like software running on cloud with AI introduced. These are technologies that do not work in 10-year cycles – they move much faster. Our ability to adopt innovation will heavily rely on these more flexible systems.”

Keep up with all the action from Connected America online using the hashtag #ConnectedAmerica

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Press Release

News

The end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) could see 23 million people lose access to connectivity

On Day 2 of Connected America, a surprise guest took to the stage to issue a rallying cry for affordable connectivity across the USA.

Austin Bonner, Deputy U.S. CTO from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, warned that 23 million people stood to lose affordable connectivity if the ACP’s funding is not renewed and urged a divided Congress to make additional funding a priority.

“Broadband access is a bipartisan issue,” said Bonner. “The pandemic showed that broadband access is a necessity and we need to ensure that every American can be part of the digital world.”

“President Biden has requested $6 billion from Congress to extend the ACP for the rest of the year,” she added, noting that the President “is committed to leaving no communities behind”.

The ACP is a benefit programme that offers eligible households discounts of between $30 to $75 per month for internet services, as well as providing one-time discounts on the purchase of laptops, tablets, and desktop computers.

Despite only around half of eligible households taking advantage of the programme, funding is running out. Currently, the ACP’s last fully funded month is set to be April, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issuing advice to affected households about finding alternative means of connectivity.

Exactly where this newfound connectivity might come from, however, it unclear. New survey data from FCC showed that nearly half of ACP households had no broadband service or relied wholly on mobile connectivity prior to receiving ACP support.

With many of these households saying that they rely upon ACP-funded connectivity to access vital services like healthcare and education, the negative impact of the programme’s cessation for some of the nation’s most vulnerable people could be severe.

In closing, Bonner thanked the Connected America crowd for their ongoing work to bring broadband access to all Americans and urged them to keep pushing forward.

“We have a lot of work to do together,” she said. “Let’s get this done.”

Keep up with all the action from Connected America online using the hashtag #ConnectedAmerica

Also in the news:
BT wins £26m contract to connect UK schools
Apple fined €1.8bn by European Commission over Spotify row
Japan to reduce regulatory pressure on incumbent NTT

Alternative network operator Freedom Fibre, which has so far deployed their gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to cover 285,000 UK premises (21st Dec 2023) – mostly in the North West of England, has today announced the addition of a third retail ISP to their growing wholesale platform with Squirrel Internet. Until recently, consumers covered […]

City-focused broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which has so far extended their full fibre (FTTP/B) broadband network to cover “more than” 1.4 million UK homes across parts of 64 UK towns and cities, has today announced the appointment of Caroline Rider to become their new Director of Residential Broadband. Caroline has 14 years of experience in commercial […]

As expected, the wholesale division of UK ISP TalkTalk has today officially rebranded itself from ‘Wholesale Services’ to ‘PlatformX Communications‘ (PXC). The move forms part of the group’s ongoing demerger process, which began last year and is currently ongoing. Just to recap. The TalkTalk Group has spent much of the past year wrestling with the […]

Business telecommunications and UK broadband ISP Spitfire has today announced that they’ve signed a new a wholesale partnership deal with Vorboss, which will enable them to harness the operator’s new 100Gbps capable dedicated full fibre network in London. At present Vorboss, which is backed by the Fern Trading Group to the tune of up to […]

Broadband ISP Connexin has said they’re investigating after their UK engineers, who were deploying poles to carry a new 10Gbps capable full fibre (FTTP) network in the East Yorkshire (England) town of Beverley, accidentally damaged a gas pipe in the Beverley Parklands area on 11th March. The network operator began their £3m roll-out in the […]

Mobile network operator giffgaff, which has pledged not to raise its prices mid-contract, has today launched a new promotion that attempts to soften the impact of soaring mobile and broadband bills by offering free pizzas across the UK via Deliveroo this Friday (15th March). The operator’s ‘It’s the yeast we could do‘ campaign (the yeast […]