Poor phone signal inside buildings costs the UK £103 billion a year
Key Points
- Freshwave says poor indoor mobile signal costs UK organisations £103 billion a year
- £63 billion of that is recoverable with better in-building 4G and 5G, down from £70 billion in 2025
- Public sector loses £63 billion; government bodies alone account for £57.4 billion
- Average organisation with 100+ staff loses £4.9 million a year
- 89% of organisations report daily connectivity disruptions
Weak indoor mobile coverage costs UK organisations £103 billion a year in lost productivity, and £63 billion of that could be recovered with better in-building 4G and 5G, according to a new report from Freshwave.
The infrastructure firm, which builds shared indoor mobile networks for landlords and enterprises, drew the figures from its second annual Mobile Connectivity ROI Index.
It surveyed 900 C-suite executives and senior IT decision-makers at UK organisations with more than 100 employees and annual revenues or budgets above £50 million.
The £103 billion loss is £3 billion higher than the £100 billion Freshwave reported in 2025. The amount it said organisations could claw back has moved the other way, falling from £70 billion last year to £63 billion in the new edition.
The public sector accounts for most of the damage, losing £63 billion a year against £40 billion across private firms.
Government and public sector bodies alone lose £57.4 billion, with £35.2 billion of that recoverable, while professional and financial services lose £15 billion, community healthcare £8.1 billion and acute care hospitals £7.3 billion.
The average organisation with more than 100 staff loses £4.9 million a year and stands to gain £3 million from better indoor coverage, the firm said. Losses climb with headcount, from £3.4 million a year at organisations with 100 to 249 employees to £23.4 million at those with 5,000 or more.
Regionally, London and the South East each stand to gain around £11 billion a year from improved indoor coverage, followed by the Midlands at £9 billion and the North West at £7 billion.
Weak coverage is more common outside the capital, with 19% of London respondents rating their indoor signal as average or poor compared with 27% across the North of England, 28% in the Midlands and 34% across Scotland and Wales.
Freshwave blamed modern building materials for much of the problem. “The same insulated walls and energy-efficient glazing that keep heating bills down are brilliant at keeping mobile signal out,” said Simon Frumkin, CEO of Freshwave.
Operators cannot justify installing their own indoor kit in most buildings, the firm added, leaving landlords and tenants to pay for shared systems themselves. Freshwave sells exactly that kind of system, and its £103 billion figure is an extrapolation rather than a measured loss.
The firm asked each respondent to estimate how much productive time their organisation loses to poor connectivity and how much of that better mobile coverage would fix.
It then multiplied those averages by revenue and applied them to every UK organisation above 100 employees in its nine target sectors, using Office for National Statistics business counts, with roughly 100 respondents per sector.
Its survey found 89% of organisations experience connectivity disruptions every day, up from 87% in 2025. It also found 74% now rank operational efficiency as the main benefit of better indoor signal, overtaking workforce productivity on 69%.
Budgets are moving in Freshwave’s favour, with 70% of organisations expecting their connectivity spend to grow over the next two years, up four percentage points on 2025. Over half said they are already upgrading indoor 4G or 5G coverage.
