INSIGHT
Connected Britain 2026
revealed three priorities for the
UK’s next connectivity chapter
For much of the last decade, the UK’s connectivity challenge has been relatively easy to describe: build more.
More fibre. Greater coverage. More capacity. New networks reaching more homes, businesses and communities.
At Connected Britain 2026, it was clear that the conversation has moved on.
That doesn’t mean the infrastructure build is finished. Far from it. But as the market matures, some of the biggest questions are changing. How do we create sustainable competition? How do we connect a rapidly evolving data centre landscape? And how can technologies such as AI translate infrastructure investment into a genuinely better experience for customers?
Ofcom captured the shift neatly during its address at the event. Having made huge progress building infrastructure, the next challenge is increasingly about making sure people and businesses benefit from it. That means moving beyond coverage and build statistics to focus on adoption, utilisation, resilience and the quality of experience customers actually receive. It’s time to shift the focus from simply building more towards delivering better.
For us at Virgin Media Business Wholesale, three priorities stood out.
The UK fibre market is reaching an important point in its development.
Years of investment have created significantly more infrastructure and
greater choice. But the economics of the market are changing.
Success can no longer be measured simply by how many kilometres of
fibre are built or premises are passed. Utilisation, sustainable
investment and the ability to keep improving networks over the long
term increasingly matter too.
During his keynote, our CEO Lutz
Schüler described the fibre market
as being at something of a fork
in the road. One direction sees
continued uncertainty across the altnet market, making the sector
less attractive to investors.
The other creates the conditions for
scaled challengers capable of providing meaningful,sustainable
competition to the incumbent.
That distinction matters to customers.
When choosing infrastructure partners, businesses aren't only buying what is available today. They are making decisions that may shape their network for years. They need confidence that their partners can continue investing, adding capacity and evolving their services as requirements change.
That makes scale valuable, but only when it is accompanied by long-term investment and genuine choice.
Virgin Media O2 has invested £10 billion over the past five years. But, as Lutz also argued, investment itself isn't the end goal. The next challenge is using that infrastructure to give customers more of what they want, while finding smarter and more efficient ways to deliver it.
Share this article:
Latest insights
Read our partner case study
1
Build for
sustainable scale,
not scale for its
own sake
2
Connectivity
needs a seat at
the infrastructure
planning table
3
Use AI to make
the experience
more human,
not less
Scale alone won’t solve the next infrastructure challenge. We also
need to change when connectivity enters the conversation.
During a panel exploring the
emerging alliance between telcos
and data centres, our head of
network infrastructure sales, Ben
Archer, highlighted just how much the
engineering challenge has changed.
Where a data centre might once have
required a primary connection and a
diverse route, new developments can
now require three, four or five diverse
routes, sometimes extending
significant distances to achieve the
resilience customers require.
Other discussions at the event reinforced the point. Different AI workloads are likely to require very different infrastructure models: from huge training facilities located where power is plentiful to inference workloads that need to sit much closer to users, enterprises and data sources.
The result is a much more distributed compute landscape.For data centre developers, neoclouds and infrastructure operators, connectivity therefore needs to be considered alongside power, planning and land, rather than treated as something to procure once all those decisions have already been made.
And the question can't simply be: is there fibre nearby?
Buyers need to understand how much usable capacity is available, whether routes are genuinely diverse, how quickly additional capacity can be delivered and whether the network can scale as requirements move from 100G and 400G to 800G and beyond.
That is particularly important as development moves outside traditional hubs. Existing infrastructure, available fibre and proximity to national and metro networks can fundamentally change both the economics and the timeline of a project.
The action for infrastructure planners is simple: bring connectivity partners into the conversation earlier. Decisions made during site selection and design can be much harder and more expensive to solve later.
Connectivity
therefore needs to
be considered
alongside power,
planning and land,
rather than treated
as something to
procure later
During a panel exploring AI and customer experience, our product and CX director, David Simpson, discussed the importance of creating a clean knowledge layer behind the wholesale customer journey.
Consider an engineer working on an installation. The information they need might sit across records of previous installs, network data, duct information and several different systems. Bringing that information together and putting the relevant context into the engineer's hands can make decisions quicker, more informed and more proactive.
That represents a much more valuable use of AI than automating processes simply because we can.
The principle discussed on the panel was human-first, not human-only.
AI can analyse information, surface recommendations and help people decide what to do next. Agentic AI can increasingly inform decisions and remove repetitive work. But that doesn't mean every decision should immediately be handed over to autonomous systems.
For us, where strong partner relationships are built on trust, that’s especially important. An efficiency gain is quickly lost if poorly governed automation damages the customer experience. The objective should be to automate the right things while keeping our people in control where judgement, relationships or customer impact matter.
The objective
should be to
automate the,
right things while
keeping our
people in control
where judgement,
relationships or
customer impact
matter.
What this means for businesses?
Measure connectivity by how fully it can be
used, not simply whether it is available.
Consider adoption, resilience, usable capacity
and the experience it supports.
Plan further ahead and involve infrastructure
partners earlier, while decisions about sites,
routes and capacity can still be shaped.
Put trusted data and clear guardrails beneath
AI, so automation removes friction without
weakening human judgement or customer
relationships.
The infrastructure conversation
is getting bigger
Perhaps the clearest takeaway from Connected Britain was how interconnected all of these challenges have become.
Power affects where compute can be located. Compute changes the traffic flowing over networks. Networks determine which locations can scale. AI can improve how those networks are operated and consumed. And all of it depends on investment decisions being made with enough confidence to think years rather than months ahead.
That makes collaboration essential. Network operators, data centre developers, cloud and AI providers, policymakers and customers cannot plan in isolation when decisions about power, sites, capacity and service increasingly affect one another. Earlier, more open collaboration can align investment with real demand, expose constraints before designs are fixed and give organisations greater confidence to invest.
The UK’s next connectivity chapter will be defined less by the volume of
infrastructure built than by how intelligently that infrastructure is planned,
connected and used. The organisations that collaborate early, plan beyond
today’s requirement and measure success through customer outcomes will be the ones that turn connectivity into lasting value.