Poor indoor mobile connectivity could be costing the UK economy as much as £103bn a year, according to a survey of senior business and public-sector decision-makers, raising questions about whether the country’s mobile infrastructure can support its ambitions for AI-powered services and automation.
Freshwave’s 2026 Mobile Connectivity ROI Index surveyed 900 C-suite and IT decision-makers across UK industries. Respondents estimated that £63bn of the potential economic impact falls on the public sector alone.
The £103bn should be treated as an estimate of the losses perceived by those surveyed, rather than a measurement of economic output actually lost. Nevertheless, the findings point to a substantial and increasingly important problem: many of the services being built on top of mobile networks depend on reliable connectivity inside the buildings where people work, shop, travel and receive care.
According to Freshwave, senior leaders believe better indoor connectivity could immediately recover more than £60bn of these annual losses, including £39bn across the public sector.
Nearly nine in ten organisations – 89% – report experiencing indoor connectivity problems every day, while more than 40% believe that a one-hour outage would either cause major disruption or bring operations to a halt.
The problem extends far beyond dropped calls. Mobile payments, authentication, enterprise messaging, connected devices and AI-enabled applications increasingly require continuous access to networks and cloud platforms. An unreliable indoor signal can prevent a transaction from being completed, delay the delivery of a security message or interrupt the flow of data between a connected device and the system analysing it.
Freshwave’s respondents identified access to continuous, real-time data as the biggest opportunity for improving efficiency and accelerating digital transformation. Suggested applications include passenger-flow monitoring at railway stations, connected devices supporting community care, intelligent surveillance in commercial buildings and real-time tracking of work on construction sites.
AI adds to the pressure because many AI-powered applications depend on a continuous exchange of data. One London chief operating officer told the survey that the “proper integration of AI into automation and analytical processes” was being hampered by poor indoor connectivity. A London-based chief information officer also identified “security and limited scalability for future growth” as concerns.
Simon Frumkin, CEO of Freshwave, says: “AI presents one of the greatest opportunities we have to grow the economy, and the efficiencies it promises rest on the connectivity underpinning many of its functions. Treating indoor mobile coverage as essential infrastructure is what turns that opportunity into results.”
For the telemedia industry, this makes indoor coverage part of the service-delivery chain rather than simply an operator concern. The industry has spent years adding more sophisticated and valuable services to mobile networks, from CPaaS and RCS messaging to payments, identity verification and IoT. Their value, however, can disappear when the user walks through the doors of a hospital, office, station or shopping centre and loses a reliable signal.
Modern buildings can compound the problem. Energy-efficient glazing and insulation may reduce heating costs, but they can also prevent outdoor mobile signals from penetrating the building. Although mobile operators continue to invest heavily in their networks, Freshwave argues that they must be selective about the buildings in which they install dedicated infrastructure.
This leaves an opening for neutral-host networks, small cells, distributed antenna systems and private 4G and 5G infrastructure, potentially funded by enterprises, property owners and public bodies rather than solely by mobile operators.
“Mobile operators invest heavily, but they have to be selective about where they go indoors, which leaves most of that estate with mobile ‘not-spots’ inside buildings,” Frumkin adds. “The right indoor mobile infrastructure solution exists today, it extends the operators’ networks where it’s needed, and the payback is immediate.”
The survey also suggests indoor coverage is part of the UK’s regional infrastructure gap. Around 23% of organisational leaders nationally rate their indoor 4G or 5G coverage as average or poor. That falls to 19% in London but rises to 27% in the North of England, 28% in the Midlands and 34% across Scotland and Wales. Yorkshire and the Humber records the highest figure at 39%, followed by the East Midlands at 37%.
Organisations appear increasingly willing to invest. Seven in ten expect their indoor-connectivity budgets to increase during the next two years. In the North West, three-quarters expect budgets to grow, while 57% are considering an indoor 4G or 5G upgrade specifically to support AI applications.
Frumkin consludes: “Indoor connectivity is essential now, in the same bracket as power and water. AI is simply making that increasingly impossible to ignore.”
The message for the telemedia ecosystem is clear. Innovation in payments, messaging, identity and AI cannot be separated from the networks carrying those services. Britain may have built an increasingly sophisticated mobile economy, but significant parts of it could remain out of reach until the indoor coverage gap is closed.
