UK SMEs relying on mobile ‘phones for telecoms continuity

UPDATED WITH READER COMMENT

Research sponsored by COMTACT has looked into the telephony practices of UK small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Simon Knockton, a student from the Shell Step programme, found that the majority of 200 SME’s who responded to a survey rely on mobile ‘phones as a business continuity method, a measure which has been shown to fail time and time again during recent wide-area disasters.

SMEs were asked ‘If your phones where to fail how would you keep in contact with your customer?’ 15 percent had no plan at all, and 45 percent planned to rely on mobiles alone. Other measures were: backup phones, 16 percent; Internet, 6 percent; mobile + Internet, 1 percent; mobiles + back-up, 15 percent.

Other findings from the survey included:

• 87 percent of SMEs have some ability to check files, software or e-mail out of the office. The remote data provision that these companies employ ranged from e-mail access over the Internet to remote desktop services but the majority had a Virtual Private Network (or VPN).

• 28 percent of respondents who had remote IT access for their business said that their provision out of the office wasn’t as good as when they were in the office.

• 10 percent of companies had no basic data back-up plan, let alone a viable business continuity programme.

• 77 percent of companies with a data back-up plan were using a physical method; either tape or disk.

www.comtact.co.uk

READER COMMENT:

The cellular operators (both GSM and CDMA operators) in Mumbai, India, experienced serious congestion problems and were unable to service their customers during the recent bomb attacks. SMS and text messages were impacted as well as ‘phone calls. On the other hand, the land line phones were working perfectly.

The above statement is substantiated by the Telecom Regulator in India TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) in a recent comment on mobile network congestion.

I think the probable solution from a business continuity perspective is to use a combination of land lines and mobiles.

However, having said that, new developments in mobile phone technologies and better agreements between network operators may mean that mobile ‘phones become much more reliable as a means of crisis communications in the future:

"Mobile network congestion during times of crises such as floods and bomb attacks could become a thing of the past. Mobile operators have found a way to make their networks interoperable with each other. This means during any crisis, the mobile infrastructure of all the operators in a city work as a single unit irrespective of the brand. So a call from an Airtel subscriber could be automatically routed through the network of Hutch or Idea depending on which network is less congested in a given area." (Source: "The Hindu Business Line" Newspaper dated August 11)

Vignesh Karthic
vsakthivel@deloitte.com

•Date: 6th September 2006• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Telecoms continuity
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UPDATED 22ND SEPTEMBER