The survey of 4,000 people by Uswitch.com, found that over three in ten experienced an outage during office hours. Extrapolated to the population, this hit the economy to the tune of nearly £5bn.
A third of people used their mobile data during an outage, the research found, and almost two thirds of these burned through their whole monthly allowance during this time.
Edinburgh was found to suffer the highest number of outages, losing more than nine million hours of broadband in total over the last year. Residents of Belfast, however, saw the shortest amount of downtime, with the city reporting only 11 hours of downtime in 12 months.
With many people in office roles poised to take on a hybrid working approach where they spend a portion of their week at home, the robustness of the UK’s broadband network is increasingly important to businesses. In January, it emerged that remote working positions have trebled since start of pandemic.
Despite the inconvenience...