18/05/2026
1 in 5 UK businesses experience broadband outages lasting more than 4 hours every month.
That's not from a survey of startups working out of co-working spaces. That's from Ofcom's Connected Nations Spring 2026 update, covering businesses of all sizes across the UK.
And most of them have no formal continuity plan in place.
For companies still treating broadband as a simple utility, this is a wake-up call. Because in 2026, your broadband connection isn't just carrying emails and file transfers. It's running your CCTV surveillance. Your door access control. Your VoIP phone system. Your nurse call infrastructure.
When the connection drops, you don't just lose productivity. You lose physical security. You lose safety-critical communications. You lose compliance.
That's the shift most businesses haven't caught up with. They're managing connectivity like it's 2015, when broadband was a convenience layer on top of standalone systems. Today, it's the backbone of integrated operations.
We've spent over 30 years designing and deploying these integrated systems for UK businesses. The pattern we see repeatedly is this: organisations invest heavily in CCTV, access control, and communications infrastructure, then connect it all through a single broadband line with no failover.
The fix isn't complicated. It starts with treating connectivity as critical infrastructure, not an IT line item. That means resilience planning, automatic failover, and regular audits of what actually depends on your connection.
If your security, communications, and safety systems all run on one pipe, the question isn't whether you'll face an outage. It's whether you'll be ready when it happens.
