International expansions have plenty of benefits to offer APAC businesses, including widening your talent pool, mitigating risks through international diversification—and, of course, helping you access new markets. That’s especially true if you’re expanding to the UK from countries like India. Since they share similar laws and structure their businesses in the same way, such a move can easily bypass common hurdles to expansion, including language barriers and cultural differences.

Of course, UK business expansions also come with their own challenges. Given how much of today’s workflows have been digitalised, broadband connections are one of them. A 2024 ISPreview UK release saw the country rank 35th in the world in terms of internet speed due to poor broadband infrastructure, making it one of the slowest in Europe and among developed nations as a whole. 

However, you may be wondering why it’s vital to prioritise studying the UK’s broadband issues when expansions necessitate seemingly more pressing tasks, such as complying with local business regulations, determining whether you should go public, and deciding where to set up shop. 

Here’s more on why broadband should be a key consideration when expanding your business to the UK:

Why study the UK’s broadband infrastructure before expanding?

Currently, many of the country’s network connections rely on traditional copper wires that display slow data transmission capabilities and can degrade easily, resulting in lags and downtime. The impact of those connections in the UK starts with reduced productivity. According to Uswitch, they currently cause British employees who work from home to lose an average of eight hours—or a full working day—of productivity every year. This issue can be exacerbated depending on where they work: compared to London’s seven hours, for example, workers from Scotland lose up to 16 hours annually. That’s something you may particularly want to consider if you’re planning to remotely manage a team based in the UK, as these losses will end up costing you down the line. 

An ISP Beaming report finds that the country’s firms recorded over 50 million hours of downtime in 2023 alone, resulting in a profit loss of £3.7 billion. However, SMEs lose even more. In London alone, they miss out on an estimated £28 billion every year just because of slow and unreliable workplace broadband. Respondents noted that they were considering moving out of London because their network issues hindered them from satisfactorily serving customers, causing them to lose business. 

Broadband-related losses can significantly undermine how much you invest in expansion efforts—including conducting market research, paying legal fees, renting office spaces, and training employees—amid fluctuating currency rates. Currently, the UK is in the process of updating its broadband infrastructure. Public initiatives like Project Gigabit are spearheading a transition to full fibre connections, which leverage optic fibre cables that can transmit data faster and reduce downtime. Unfortunately, project delays mean your business may incur similar losses if you expand operations here without considering and tackling the country’s broadband issues. 

Securing better broadband for your UK presence

Due to the aforementioned delays, internet service providers (ISPs) offering full fibre connections currently do not service all areas of the UK. That’s something you’ll want to consider if you’re setting up shop outside the capital, especially since we’ve noted that other UK cities and regions offer competitive advantages for specific industries. Cheshire, for example, is renowned for dairy and textile production, while Aberdeen boasts a thriving oil and gas sector. 

It’s thus vital to carefully select where to expand based on where you’ll find ISPs offering the bandwidth you require. In offering full fibre Crewe availability, Zzoomm provides the necessary improvements even outside city centres. Its plans offer the Cheshire town reliable speeds between 150Mbps and 10,000Mbps, which is significantly higher than Crewe’s median broadband speed of 63Mbps. Since such broadband packages can be further tweaked for businesses through the inclusion of a dedicated phone line and wider Wi-Fi 6 coverage, they can help you better start organising your UK operations and keep them seamlessly connected to your head offices. 

APAC businesses expanding to one of the country’s cities can also reap the same benefits, especially now that local telecommunications providers are independently updating broadband infrastructure in certain areas. With CityFibre recently establishing Aberdeen full fibre infrastructure, for instance, the Scottish port city can now leverage a 762-kilometre network of optic fibre cables and have ISPs like Vodafone install working full fibre connections in as little as five working days.