Coverage is only the start: what connectivity means for Welsh businesses

Natalie Strange

Managing Director @ RPS Telecom

September 16, 2026

CONNECTED BRITAIN 2026

Last week, I joined the ‘Digital Wales: Accelerating growth through connectivity and innovation’ panel at Connected Britain 2026. The discussion covered infrastructure investment, rural coverage, regulation and Wales’s future digital ambitions, but the point I kept coming back to was much simpler: what does all of this actually mean for the business at the end of the conecton?

Availability is not the same as delivery

There has been significant progress in fibre coverage across Wales, and that should absolutely be recognised but I think we need to be careful about what we mean by ‘available’. There is a big difference between fibre passing a building, a service being orderable and a customer actually being connected.

We recently had an FTTP order where fibre showed as available and the order could be placed, but it still took 210 days to get the customer connected. Along the way there were ducting problems, civils works, permissions and engineering complications. On paper, fibre was available. In practice, the customer was still waiting for a working service.

That is why I do not think coverage figures alone tell the whole story. From the customer’s perspective, what matters is whether the service can actually be delivered, whether it works reliably and whether the business can use it in the way it needs to.

When connectivity fails, it becomes a business problem quickly

For most SMEs today, broadband is not simply another utility. It sits underneath almost everything they do: cloud applications, CRM systems, telephony, payments, customer communications, remote working, AI and collaboration. When connectivity fails, it very quickly stops being an IT problem and becomes a commercial one.

Take a legal firm where employees charge by the hour. An hour without access to systems can have a directly measurable financial impact. Or an estate agent: if a prospective buyer calls and cannot get through, they do not necessarily wait for the connection to return – they call the next agent.

Those are the kinds of business impacts I wanted to bring into the panel discussion. For a small business, even a relatively short outage can mean lost productivity, lost revenue and lost customers.

Resilience has to be realistic for SMEs

The obvious response is that businesses should have backup connectivity and, where possible, they absolutely should, but there is an economic reality too. Many SMEs simply cannot justify paying every month for two genuinely independent connectivity services purely in case one fails.

That raises an important question for our industry: how do we make resilience more accessible to smaller businesses? There will not be one answer. Alternative technologies such as 4G, 5G and low-earth-orbit satellite services can all play a role, but they are not automatically suitable for every location, every workflow, or every business-critical application. The technology has to fit the business requirement.

Customer service is part of resilience

There is another part of connectivity that I do not think receives enough attention: the provider supporting it.

A business can have access to excellent infrastructure, but if it does not trust the organisation supporting that connection, availability does not automatically translate into adoption. When something goes wrong, an SME needs more than a fault reference. It needs someone who answers the phone, understands what being offline means for that particular business, takes ownership, communicates clearly and looks for ways to keep the organisation operational while the underlying fault is resolved.

For me, customer service from a connectivity provider is part of business resilience. The technology matters, but so does the confidence that someone will be there when it does not work as expected.

Are we measuring the right things?

One statistic I kept coming back to while preparing for the panel was business survival. Only 38.1% of Welsh businesses born in 2019 were still active five years later. Connectivity is clearly not responsible for whether a business succeeds or fails; finance, skills, demand, leadership, cots and many other factors all play a role.

But it does make me question what we regard as success. If we want more businesses to start, survive, scale and invest in Wales, are we doing enough to create the conditions in which they can succeed? Increasingly, connectivity underpins how businesses communicate, sell, collaborate, recruit, automate and access new markets. Digital infrastructure should make doing business in Wales easier, not become another barrier to overcome.

"Coverage tells us what we have built. Business impact tells us whether it mattered."

The real measure of success

For me, the journey is simple. Is connectivity available? Can the business actually access it? Can it rely on it? Will somebody support it when something fails? And, ultimately, does that connectivity enable the organisation to operate more effectively, serve customers better and grow?

We should absolutely celebrate the progress Wales is making on connectivity, but coverage cannot be the finishing line. The real measure of success is what Welsh businesses, communities and people are able to do because that connectivity is there.