Nearly 11 million people have experienced a broadband blackout lasting over three hours in the past year. Nottingham was named Britain’s “outage Capital”.
According to figures, the average household in the UK lost almost two days of internet access due to power outages, maintenance and service disruptions.
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According to the report by the utility comparison website Uswitch, homes in Nottingham were affected by outages for 9.2 million hours. This equates to a loss of 70 hours per year or nearly three days of uninterrupted broadband access.
The next worst hit cities were Manchester and Southampton.
With a population of 337,00, Nottingham is now the most affected city by broadband outages.
The report stated that homes in the UK were affected by outages at an average rate of 19 hours per year. The average UK home was down for almost 45 hours, or nearly two days, when additional factors are considered that can cause internet outages.
Remote and flexible workers working from home were affected by outages. 16% said that their work was affected at an estimated economic cost of almost PS1.3bn.
Fivety-one percent of respondents said that they had worked at home at least once a month, accumulating more than 25m work hours and more than 1m days of lost time for their employers in the past year.
Ernest Doku, a broadband expert from Uswitch, said that “Misfiring home internet can quickly become an annoying problem, since video calls have become essential to many remote workers.”
