Payment failures at UK markets and festivals are costing traders an estimated £10 million a year in lost sales, Virgin Media O2 and the National Market Traders Federation (NMTF) reported this week, as the pair called on the Government to reform decade-old net neutrality rules blocking operators from prioritising payment traffic.
The number is larger than it first looks. Behind it sits a figure that shows, Virgin Media O2 reported, how far the problem reaches: 73% of traders surveyed lost sales in the last year because of payment issues, and one in seven lost more than £1,000 annually. The £10 million estimate comes from applying those survey results — 73% reporting losses averaging £530 each — across the NMTF’s roughly 25,000 members.
The expectation was that cashless payments would solve the trader’s connectivity problem. What happened instead, the research found, is that card payments now account for about seven in 10 transactions at events, a growing number of traders run entirely cashless — and the mobile network buckles under event demand exactly when transactions need to clear.
Ryan Patrick, who founded Feast Streat Group, a street food catering company operating cashless food trucks at large-scale events across the UK, said his setup is engineered to turn out 30-40 restaurant quality meals every 20 seconds during a rush, which makes fast and reliable payments absolutely essential. Even a few extra seconds on a payment can make all the difference, and an outright failed payment is far worse.
Connectivity issues cause lost sales
Six in 10 traders told the survey that connectivity for payments is a problem for their business. The downstream effects, Virgin Media O2 found, stack up in a way that any queue theorist would recognise: congestion at the network layer becomes congestion at the counter.
| Survey finding (NMTF members, Virgin Media O2 research) | Share of traders |
|---|---|
| Lost sales in the last year due to payment issues | 73% |
| Report failed transactions as a consequence | 70% |
| See customers abandoning purchases altogether | 47% |
| Report longer queues | 37% |
| Annual losses above £1,000 | 1 in 7 |
The research covered 312 market traders. The failure mode is specific: traders often operate in locations that see sharp surges in visitors during one-off or irregular events, so the cell serving the site goes from quiet to saturated in an hour. Application-layer retries then make it worse — a card terminal that times out re-sends its request into an already congested cell, adding load while earning nothing.
Net neutrality rules written before this problem existed
Virgin Media O2 says it has the technical capability to prioritise business-critical, time-sensitive applications like payment services during periods of exceptional demand, but that current net neutrality rules — created over a decade ago — prevent it. The rules were designed to protect consumers from paid discrimination in traffic handling; the company argues they now stifle innovation by blocking services even where demand is clear.
The technical distinction matters. Explicit congestion notification and quality-of-service marking exist in mainstream mobile networking precisely so that latency-sensitive traffic can be handled differently from bulk download traffic.
Payment authorisation is a small, bursty, deadline-bound flow; a stalled one fails outright rather than degrading gracefully. Prioritising it is not the same as throttling a rival’s video stream — but the current framework, Virgin Media O2 argues, does not let operators draw that line commercially.
Earlier this year, a report by Communications Chambers for Virgin Media O2 argued that reforming the rules could unlock innovation worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the economy, alongside new investment in networks including advanced 5G.
Beyond payment apps for small businesses, the report pointed to other real-world use cases: prioritising time-sensitive apps such as map-based navigation or taxi requests outside major venues, and letting a user prioritise an important video call over other apps on their own connection.
NMTF traders benefit from reform
The winners under the proposed change would be the 25,000 market and street traders, events retailers and mobile caterers the NMTF represents across Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
The beneficiaries of the alternative — no reform — are harder to name, though Virgin Media O2 notes it is investing £700 million this year under its Mobile Transformation Plan to improve reliability, speed and 4G and 5G coverage nationwide, within £2 billion deployed this year across its networks and services overall.
“At Virgin Media O2, we’re investing £700 million in our mobile network this year to improve capacity. Yet during periods of congestion, it makes no sense that rules created a decade ago hinder us from prioritising this business-critical traffic.”
Said Jeanie York, Chief Technology Officer at Virgin Media O2. She framed the ask in economic terms: “If the Government is serious about delivering good growth in every postcode, the Government must remove the barriers holding small businesses back.” Reform, she said, could unlock wider innovation and investment in 5G.
The NMTF’s chief executive made the same case from the trader’s side.
“These current rules deprive our members of further grow in their businesses but in terms of turnover and Sustainability. “The Government need to act swiftly on this matter.” Mobile Catering Traders
Said Joe Harrison, Chief Executive of the NMTF, the professional trade body for market, events, festival, street and mobile catering traders. The lack of signal at events, he said, was hindering members considerably.
The offline fallback that isn’t
Traders have already tried engineering around the congestion problem, and the workaround has its own failure mode. Patrick previously used a service that could take payments offline and process them later — a deferred authorisation pattern common at events with patchy coverage.
It did not hold up, Virgin Media O2 reported. He regularly found that thousands of pounds’ worth of transactions were declined when they were finally processed, because by the time the batch cleared, the customer’s card had failed authorisation. The sale was made; the money was not.
That detail cuts against the standard advice that offline payment modes solve event connectivity. An approvals queue deferred by hours or days converts a network problem into a credit problem, and the trader still absorbs the loss.
What the £10 million number is really measuring
The estimate is deliberately conservative in construction: 73% of members, times an average self-reported loss of £530, across roughly 25,000 members, gives approximately £9.7 million — rounded to £10 million. It excludes the customer side of the ledger, which the survey sizes separately: nearly half of traders have watched a shopper walk away mid-purchase.
Virgin Media O2 is forecasting double-digit annual growth in mobile network demand over the next three years, driven by higher per-customer data consumption, more 5G-enabled devices and rising upload demand. At an event site, all three trends land on the same cell.
The ask now sits with government. Joe Harrison said that in order for these micro and small businesses to survive into the future, the rules holding back prioritisation need to change.
