It’s a widely known fact that many companies and organizations in the UK greatly depend on mobile communication. With the help of their mobile devices, people can stay in touch with their co-workers and bosses even while being out of office, communicate with their partners and clients and perform a wide range of tasks being on the move. Nevertheless, a lack of mobile coverage, especially in rural areas, seriously affects their working processes.
It’s quite expectable that such problems are much more serious in rural areas. 91% of businesses located in these zones reported the issues. As for rural areas, 56% of companies working in there complained about problems with mobile coverage.
Experts admit that these gaps in mobile coverage leading to problems with mobile phone signal don’t give people an opportunity to work on the move or to perform various online tasks.
Though now the technologies have already reached an amazing level of their development, many businesspeople still can find themselves fully disconnected which may result in various business problems including lost money and canceled contracts.
The analysts from the British Chambers of Commerce point out that though rural companies feel the most serious impact of poor mobile connection, the problems with mobile coverage exist all across the country. Even in the City of London businesses are obliged to suffer from a poor mobile signal.
According to the data published by the British Chambers of Commerce, 29% of companies in towns have reported unstable mobile internet signal while in rural areas this problem is much more obvious. 54% of firms in rural areas are experiencing difficulties in getting connected to the mobile internet. Large companies with more than 500 employees report 4G issues more often (57%), while only 41% of smaller firms with 1–4 team members noted that they are suffering from this problem.
It is believed that such problems can be addressed on the governmental level that’s why the experts call on the next government to work precisely on the initiatives that will ensure better coverage which will increase the productivity of many businesses.
Nevertheless, at the moment it is clear that the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the UK state regulator, hasn’t managed to reach its goal to ensure the coverage of 90% of the country’s territory yet.
Last year, Ofcom got the right to impose fines on those mobile services providers who don’t ensure a proper level of mobile signal quality and coverage. Such a decision was taken after the publication of the report that demonstrated that mobile signal coverage in the UK had not improved significantly since 2014, though billions of pounds had been invested in this sphere.
