Government data shows many UK businesses still not online

It’s nearly 2017. Think all British businesses are online?

Think again.

In 2015, only 83.0% of all UK businesses had Internet access, 80.7% of all businesses used a fixed broadband connection – and only a slim majority, 55.6%, used a mobile broadband Internet connection.

And only half of British firms – 50.1% – had a website in 2015, up 2.6 percentage points from the 2014, and only one in three, 35.0% of all businesses, used social media (up from 32.0% in 2014).

The data, fresh from government data watchers ONS, shows how far some SMEs may still have to go to take advantage of what some may still think of as the Interweb.

Other ONS findings do show how the vast majority of British businesses are exploiting the power of the Web, though.

Thus the number of businesses subscribing to broadband with a connection speed of between 30 and 100 Mbps has gone up to 16.9% in 2015, while only 6.9% have to get by with broadband speeds of less than 2 Mbps.

Still, it seems it’s big businesses that are reaping the biggest rewards from Internet connectivity, with the bulk of all e-commerce sales stemming from Electronic Data Interchange, £320bn of the national total.

Other website sales totalled £234bn in 2015 (up from £214bn in 2014), or 42.2% of total e-commerce sales, says ONS.

Check out the full dataset here.