ComReg has published a study by DotEcon (with the support of Analysys Mason) into the resilience of networks and the occurrence of network incidents. It explores the prevalence and impact of connectivity outages using crowd-sourced big data and a large-scale consumer survey, capturing the heterogeneous consumer experiences of network outages.

We measure the relative performance of different platforms and find that diversity in backhaul networks is associated with greater reliability. There is evidence of power laws at work in the likelihood of outages of different scales, with a long tail of high impact events.

Consumers’ unmet demand for reliability would justify an investment of at least €2 billion into improving resilience, similar in scale to the Irish state’s contribution to its National Broadband Plan.