The UK’s fibre rollout has been, by most measures, a success story. Gigabit coverage is approaching 90 per cent of premises. A decade of industry effort and billions in capital expenditure have brought high-speed broadband to the vast majority of the country. It is the kind of milestone that generates ministerial statements and trade association congratulations in equal measure.

Lee Myall is not dismissing any of that. But as CEO of Neos Networks, one of the UK’s leading providers of core fibre infrastructure, he is increasingly focused on what the access buildout has left unexamined, and what that oversight is beginning to cost.

“The conversation now needs to shift further into the network,” he says. “Particularly towards the UK’s core fibre backbone. Yet despite headlines about data centres as the destination for AI, the connectivity underpinning these sites is still treated as an afterthought or simply assumed to be there.”

Neos Networks’ own research puts a number on the consequences of that assumption. Eighty-two per cent of UK data centre operators have delayed deployments because of missing core fibre. That figure, Myall says, is not a warning of future risk. It is a description of something already happening.

The geography of AI has changed

Understanding why the backbone gap has emerged requires understanding how the data centre market itself has shifted. The old model, clustering facilities in places like Slough, where connectivity was dense and latency requirements were tight, no longer defines where new capacity is being built.

“AI and large language models aren’t latency-sensitive in the same way,” Myall explains. “Because of this, developers are now chasing larger requirements for power, cooling, land, and closer proximity to renewable energy. This is pushing new developments into regional hubs, such as the North of England and the Midlands, but the core fibre hasn’t always been there to meet them.”

The result is a structural mismatch: capital and planning ambition flowing into regions where the network infrastructure needed to make those data centres functional has not kept pace. Investment stalls not because sites cannot be built, but because they cannot be connected.

Myall points to Project Reach, Neos Networks’ initiative to deploy fibre along Network Rail’s railway corridors as one practical response. “The access rights are already established,” he says, “allowing deployment to happen much more predictably and faster.” It is a pragmatic approach to a long-term problem, using existing physical infrastructure to extend core fibre into areas where traditional deployment timelines would otherwise run to years.

The CMA is looking at the wrong layer

The Competition and Markets Authority’s review of the proposed £2 billion acquisition of Netomnia by VMO2 has focused, understandably, on the 80 per cent network overlap between the two access networks and the risk of cementing a BT and VMO2 duopoly in the retail broadband market. Myall does not dispute that those issues are real. He disputes that they are sufficient.

“Wholly focusing on ‘premises passed’ ignores the required infrastructure investment that is needed to enable the UK’s broader economic growth ambitions,” he says. A review that concerns itself exclusively with access-layer competition, in his view, fails to address the infrastructure that enterprise, AI and data centre customers actually depend on.

The distinction matters because the two network layers serve fundamentally different markets. Access networks carry consumer broadband to homes and small businesses. Core backbone networks carry the high-capacity, high-resilience traffic that moves between data centres, between cloud platforms, between enterprise sites and the compute environments they increasingly depend on. Consolidation at the access layer, whatever its effects on retail competition, does nothing to address the capacity and resilience of the core.

“If policymakers focus solely on premises passed and retail competition, they risk overlooking the infrastructure that actually enables AI, data centre expansion, and enterprise connectivity at scale,” Myall says. “Without that shift, the UK risks having world-class access networks connected to underpowered core infrastructure, limiting the return on its broader digital ambitions.”

Planning for unpredictable demand

For operators trying to build and manage backbone infrastructure capable of serving AI workloads, the technical challenge is compounded by a fundamental shift in how demand behaves. Training clusters, inference engines and storage platforms generate east-west traffic flows that are large, dynamic and difficult to model using traditional capacity planning assumptions.

“The old model of building fibre speculatively and waiting for demand to arrive is becoming less relevant,” Myall says. What replaces it is a more targeted approach, building around where compute, cloud and enterprise demand is actually emerging, rather than where it has historically been concentrated. Customers, he adds, increasingly want real-time visibility into network availability and utilisation, alongside direct control over how bandwidth is consumed and provisioned.

That is a different proposition from the relatively predictable growth curves that defined the access buildout era. It demands a different kind of infrastructure relationship, one where speed of provisioning, flexibility and network intelligence matter as much as raw capacity.

Myall’s message to policymakers considering the Netomnia review, and to the government’s broader digital infrastructure strategy, is straightforward: treat backbone connectivity as strategic national infrastructure, not as a commercial matter for the market to resolve at its own pace.

“A more balanced approach would treat backbone connectivity as strategic national infrastructure and prioritise investment, planning, and policy support accordingly,” he says. The UK has invested heavily in ensuring that nearly every home can access a gigabit connection. The question now is whether the networks behind those connections, and behind the data centres and AI systems that will define the next decade of digital growth, are receiving the same attention.

On current evidence, Myall’s answer is clear. They are not.

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