Partner Article

Poor in-building mobile reception is bad news for small businesses

For the home-based business, the cost of keeping in touch with customers, colleagues and suppliers can be a troubling one. When working assiduously to minimise overheads, the cost of a dedicated business line can be an expense too far.

Not surprisingly, many choose to use a combination of their existing home phone line and mobile phone to conduct their business; selecting a mobile phone package of calls, texts and data that suits their business needs.

To keep home and business distinctly separate the mobile number is the one that’s published for incoming calls. Indeed, for sole traders, spending much of their time out and about, contact via a mobile number alone may give them everything they need.

However, this way of working is frequently blighted by poor mobile coverage indoors. When on the move, all may be well but from the study at home it is often a different matter entirely.

A 2013 Ofcom study puts some figures around the issue of in-building mobile coverage. It revealed that nearly a quarter (24%) of UK consumers are not satisfied with their ability to make and receive calls at home on their mobile and that over a third (34%) are dissatisfied with this in their places of work.

This generally concurs with Vonage’s findings later in the year. When asked if they’d ever found coverage or reception to be poor at home when trying to make business calls on their mobile, 38 per cent of home workers said they had experienced this at least once a month.

Patchy or unreliable indoor mobile service can be down to a number of factors – distance from the operator’s mobile base station site, interference from other wireless signals; even the construction of the building itself and the type of materials used.

Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, the impact on the home-based business is unsustainable. Missed calls; a disrupted ability to dial out when calls need to be placed; text messages and voicemails delivered hours after they were sent.

All of which is bad news for home-based businesses whose professional image may depend on the reliability of their mobile phone at home. Without it they are less effective, may come across as unreliable and their reputation may suffer as a result.

UK mobile operators are reported to be working to improve the situation and Ofcom is looking at technical and operational solutions to help alleviate the problem.

An alternative to installing an expensive second line to address the issue meanwhile, is an ‘over-the-top’ solution. The astute home-based business owner connects a box to their existing broadband line and plugs a phone into it to make and receive calls in the normal way.

Businesses still need their mobile phones of course. They can be integrated into one simple, clear and, most importantly cost-effective calling plan with Vonage Extensions. In this way the tariff for calls made over the home phone extends to calls made from the mobile phone. And because those calls are via wifi when in the home they won’t suffer from that troubling coverage problem.

So many channels of communication are available to us in this complicated technology age. The small business needs cost-effective, simple, reliable solutions that support them as they strive to develop and grow their business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Burckhardt .