As I have been driving across England’s green and pleasant land visiting friends and family this summer, I discovered that the UK’s phone signal is really, really terrible. I expected poor connectivity on coastal paths in Cornwall, but everywhere I went I experienced problems: network dropouts as I tried to navigate the M1, recurrent outages as I tried to work remotely from Sussex, endless loading and buffering screens (even though my phone promised me 4G) regardless of whether I was in London or the Lake District. The signal in a friend’s home in south east London is so terrible you would think we were trying to beam through the Great Pyramid of Giza. I have had more reliable phone service on safari in Tanzania than I have on Great Western Rail.
There is a much more serious issue at stake here: the UK’s productivity problem
It turns out I’m not alone. According to a Which? survey, a third of the UK’s mobile phone users have experienced problems with their network provider in the past year, whilst another survey found that 42 per cent of Londoners have poor signal at home. Just 69 per cent of rural areas are covered by all four big mobile network providers, whilst over a third of attempts to connect to WiFi on trains repeatedly fail. The UK recently fell from 44th to 51st in the world for mobile connectivity. We rank 22nd out of 25 European countries for 5G, and have the lowest download speeds in the G7.
There are many reasons for this poor performance. Bureaucratic planning regulations make putting up 50m-tall 5G masts challenging, and it is harder for phone signals to penetrate the more energy-efficient materials in new buildings. Security risks mean we can no longer use Huaiwei’s technology, and most phones are automatically programmed to jump to one bar of 5G rather than three bars of 4G.
Ultimately, it comes down to lack of investment in telecoms infrastructure. While the government has set ambitious targets – it wants 95% of the UK to have 4G coverage by the end of 2025, and all ‘populated’ areas to have standalone 5G by 2030 – it will struggle to achieve this unless we can upgrade our infrastructure to keep up with more devices and users.
It might seem like a First World problem to complain that I can’t always watch Netflix on the go or summon an Uber when I need to, but there is a much more serious issue at stake here: the UK’s productivity problem. Over the last 15 years the UK has suffered from anaemic productivity growth, which has been a major cause of wage stagnation and chronic under-investment. To put it simply, if we put productivity (usually measured as output or value added per hour) in the US at 100, then Germany ends up somewhere around 125, France around 130 and the UK around 75, meaning we are almost half as productive as our main trading partners.
Is that so surprising when we consider the millions of hours wasted commuting on trains with no WiFi or data signal? We have some of the longest commutes in the world: out of 21 countries, only the Japanese and South Koreans spend more time getting to the office than we do. Yet rather than investing in upgrading the available WiFi on trains (at an estimated cost of £200m), the Department for Transport spent months last year wondering whether to get rid of it altogether. This might be fine if passengers could rely on mobile data, but with masts so few and far between, the commute is reduced to dead time.
I am no engineer, and I understand that providing reliable internet to a fast moving, often densely populated metal carriage may not always be easy. Surely, however, this is an issue of cost-cutting rather than capability. To put things in perspective, passengers in Japan can expect seamless 4G in a train travelling through a sea tunnel between Honshu and Hokkaido (a distance about the same length as the Channel Tunnel). This is more than I can expect if I get a Thameslink train between London and Brighton, which doesn’t even offer tables or plug sockets.
This is also potentially stifling the productivity of people working from home, who can’t always depend on super-fast broadband either. On average, British employees work from home for a day and a half a week – more than in 33 out of 34 rich countries. How many hours are potentially wasted on slow internet, or hanging out a window trying to get a better signal in order to hotspot? According to one survey, it could equate to two full working days a year, costing the economy an estimated £598 million. If Labour wants to deliver growth, then improving connectivity may be a good place to start.
Comments