Congestion within the UK's public internet infrastructure could hurt customer relationships for 30 per cent of web-based enterprises, according to new research released by a fibre network provider.

Geo spoke to a number of network professionals as well as both large and small businesses in IT about whether they had access to the necessary amount of bandwidth for their businesses, while also asking about experience of network slowdowns and outages.

It was discovered that 30 per cent of businesses had either slowdowns or faults, while 27 per cent believed it would potentially lose them custom as a result. Two per cent reported the verified loss of a customer.

At least one hour of operational time per week was lost by 70 per cent of respondents due to poor network performance, which, when paralleled with the average daily commute of 54 minutes as outlined by WorkWise UK, wasted more of a business' time.

It follows research this week from Point Topic which has suggested that plans to introduce fibre optic broadband across Great Britain will not be likely to meet the overall demand of the nation.

In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were guaranteed response times and allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues.