One-hour of signal outage would bring down 40% of UK businesses
Key Points
- Over 40% of large UK organisations say a one-hour outage would stop or seriously disrupt operations
- 89% report daily connectivity disruptions, up from 87% in 2025
- 96% say AI adoption is now shaping their connectivity investment
- 38% expect mobile connectivity to become critical infrastructure within three years
- 70% expect connectivity budgets to grow over the next two years
More than 40% of large UK organisations say a single hour without connectivity would cause major disruption or force their operations to stop, according to a survey of 900 senior executives published by indoor mobile network firm Freshwave.
The finding comes from Freshwave’s Mobile Connectivity ROI Index 2026, which polled C-suite executives and senior IT decision-makers at organisations with more than 100 employees across nine sectors.
It found 89% of respondents already experience connectivity disruptions every day, up from 87% in the 2025 edition.
Freshwave linked the growing exposure to AI, cloud software and real-time monitoring tools that stop working the moment a connection drops.
It found 96% of organisations now say AI adoption is influencing their investment in connectivity infrastructure, with 35% calling it a strong influence and 15% a major driver.
The British Chambers of Commerce puts the share of UK firms actively using AI at 54%, up from 35% in 2025, 25% in 2024 and 23% in 2023, the report noted. Respondents ranked high reliability (59%) and secure connectivity (58%) as the two most important network characteristics for supporting AI applications.
One CIO in the North West described congestion during peak working hours cutting off access to cloud systems and collaboration tools. “Reliance on fixed broadband creates a single point of failure, leading to operational delays when outages occur,” they said.
Freshwave said poor indoor coverage costs UK organisations £103 billion a year in lost productivity, of which £63 billion could be recovered with better in-building 4G and 5G.
It calculated the figures by extrapolating respondents’ own estimates of lost productive time across every UK organisation above 100 employees in its target sectors, and the firm sells the shared indoor mobile systems it recommends.
Looking two to three years ahead, 38% of respondents expect mobile connectivity to become critical infrastructure for their organisation and a further 40% see it as a supporting technology. Only 20% described it as important but not strategic.
Spending plans reflect the shift, with 70% expecting their connectivity budget to grow over the next two years and 49% investing in network reliability and redundancy.
In the North West, 75% of respondents expect their budgets to increase and 57% are weighing an indoor 4G or 5G upgrade specifically to support AI, the highest share of any large region.
