Infrastructure is only the starting point. The real difference is how providers show up when things get messy; who takes ownership, who chases, who communicates, and who resolves issues rather than forwarding updates. Same fibre, completely different experience.
Connectivity technology has commoditised - but service hasn’t. And that’s where most providers still get it wrong.
“Is connectivity really a commodity these days?”
It’s a question I hear a lot, and on the surface, the answer feels like yes.
Prices have fallen, speeds have increased, and choice has exploded. Over the last decade, connectivity technology really has commoditised at pace.
AltNets have entered the market aggressively, doing exactly what the government and Ofcom wanted them to do: disrupt the effective monopoly BT once held and accelerate full-fibre rollout across the UK.
That intervention has broadly worked - but it’s also had some unintended consequences. In many areas, we now have overbuild, intense price competition, and multiple providers selling what looks like the same thing. The result is that, if you look purely at access speeds and monthly cost, connectivity increasingly looks like a commodity.
If you stop the analysis there, you’d conclude the market has become a race to the bottom.
But that’s the wrong lens, and it’s the one the industry keeps defaulting to.
Why service quality has not commoditised
Customers aren’t really buying technology. They’re buying service, and service has not commoditised at all.
In fact, the gap between good and bad service in connectivity is vast. Two providers can sell the same access, at roughly the same price, often over the same underlying infrastructure - and deliver completely different outcomes.
This is something the wider industry is now openly acknowledging. PwC, for example, has been explicit that telecoms is being pushed towards commoditisation at the network level, and that traditional connectivity revenues are under sustained pressure. Their conclusion is that differentiation must come from elsewhere - particularly customer experience, operational excellence, and service quality, not raw access alone.
Several industry reports also suggest organisations increasingly choose and retain providers based on service quality rather than price, and that speed of response to faults is the number one factor in making a decision to stay with a provider.
The hidden cost of transactional connectivity buying
Connectivity has been talked about so transactionally that many people now treat it like switching stationery suppliers - a few forms, a new logo on the invoice, but the same blue pens turning up when you need them. The trouble is that connectivity isn’t pens. It’s complex, and when it goes wrong, it goes expensively wrong.
Leased line and fibre installs in the UK typically take 45–90 working days, and routinely run longer whenever wayleaves, engineering works or local authority approvals are involved. These delays are one of the biggest drivers of provisioning‑related complaints flagged in Ofcom’s data, where activation and service‑fault issues consistently show up across the most complained‑about providers.
So, while connectivity may look commoditised on the surface, the reality is simple: When service fails, projects stall, office moves slip, costs rise - and businesses pay the price.
When connectivity is treated as a transactional purchase, risks are often invisible until something breaks. The best service providers recognise that complexity is unavoidable and design their entire operating model around managing it, not wishing it away.
Where connectivity providers add value
The best service providers add value at every stage of the relationship.
At the front end, they invest in talented salespeople and account managers who are bright enough to care. People who take the time to understand a customer’s business, explain where the technology genuinely adds value, where compromises are sensible, and where the risks sit. That kind of conversation is still surprisingly rare in a market obsessed with price per meg.
A good example of this is how technologies like SD-WAN have been sold over the past few years. Momentum, marketing, and vendor influence have often driven adoption ahead of genuine customer need, with solutions positioned as default answers rather than assessed for relevance or feasibility.
And this is not to say that SD-WAN is being sold purely on margin. It’s an innovative solution to a pressing problem, but it’s not always the most viable or valuable solution for some businesses.
Too often, conversations focus on features rather than outcomes or benefits - what the technology can do, not what the business needs it to achieve. The providers that add real value take a different approach. They start with the organisation’s priorities and constraints and then shape a solution that fits, drawing on a broad range of services, core network capabilities, and future-proofing options, rather than forcing customers into a one-size-fits-all model.
Connectivity delivery is a project, not an admin task
During delivery, the difference becomes even clearer. Good providers have recognised that connectivity order management is not a junior admin task. Installing fibre into real buildings is a project.
In my experience, around 20–30% of installs encounter an unexpected challenge - wayleaves, access issues, civils, power, or legacy infrastructure. When that happens, having a proper project manager rather than a thin process wrapper makes all the difference.
When skilled people take ownership of these challenges, delivery transforms. We consistently see higher customer satisfaction and faster outcomes. In fact, a managed order that hits a wayleave typically completes 23 days earlier than one left to crawl through a passive process. 23 days is the difference between hitting a critical deadline or delaying the opening of an entire office.
Prevention is the hardest value in this industry to recognise, because, by definition, you never see it. We’ve spent decades measuring service by what breaks - call closure times, fault resolution times, MTTR, etc. But prevention doesn’t produce tickets. It doesn’t generate dashboards. It just quietly removes the problems that would’ve kept you up at night.
The best analogy is vaccination. When you get vaccinated, you’re protecting yourself, but you’ll never know what you avoided. Maybe you dodged a miserable week off work. Maybe you avoided a holiday-ruining illness. Or maybe nothing would’ve happened at all. The act of prevention changes the future so completely that the “what if” disappears.
Prevention vs reaction: The hidden gap in connectivity support
Once the service is live, mature providers focus on prevention rather than reaction. Well-run support teams spend time reducing incidents, not just responding to P1s. Analysts consistently point out that fault response and service reliability now matter more to customers than marginal differences in speed or headline price.
Billing: The most overlooked part of the connectivity experience
In good businesses, billing teams have access to accurate information and are empowered to deliver good customer service, not just follow a process. That sounds basic, but anyone who’s been on the wrong end of a billing issue knows how quickly trust can be lost.
Billing isn’t just a finance function. It’s a trust mechanism, and once trust erodes, everything else feels harder.
The true cost of “cheaper” connectivity
We can all probably think of an example where a small saving on paper led to a big hassle in reality - delays, missed deadlines, finger-pointing, or weeks of avoidable frustration. Connectivity is no different. When it goes well, it’s invisible. When it goes badly, it becomes painfully visible very quickly.
Why Account Management still matters more than price
Threaded through all of this is the account team. The best providers reward people for customer satisfaction, not just revenue. They’re easy to deal with, organised, kind, and accountable. Those things don’t show up on a price list, but they absolutely show up over time.
This isn’t really a targeting problem; it’s a cultural one. In some organisations, account management has drifted away from the customer and towards the system. Too much time is spent maintaining CRM hygiene and internal processes, and not enough time is spent actually seeing customers, understanding their environment, and working around their realities.
Good account management is inconvenient by nature: it means adapting to other people’s schedules, dealing with issues that don’t fit neatly into a weekly rhythm, and showing up when it matters rather than when it’s easy.
Since the pandemic, parts of the industry seem to have forgotten that. But providers who still value face time, judgement, and accountability know that these behaviours compound over time - and that’s where real trust, and real differentiation, is built.
Service: The only sustainable differentiator
What’s changed in recent years is that service is no longer just a differentiator; it’s becoming the only one that lasts.
As fibre parity increases, technical advantages erode quickly. At the same time, customer expectations have been shaped by cloud and SaaS providers, where reliability and responsiveness are assumed rather than marketed.
Against that backdrop, service failures are more visible, more costly, and less tolerated. Providers that treat service as a margin drain will increasingly struggle to differentiate. Those who treat it as a strategic capability won’t.
How buyers should rethink connectivity decisions
For customers, this means the buying lens needs to change.
Speed and price still matter, but they’re table stakes. The more meaningful questions sit elsewhere:
How does this provider handle installs that don’t go to plan?
Who owns issues end-to-end when something breaks?
How visible and accountable is the account team post-sale?
What happens when a bill is wrong?
Those answers don’t always appear in a proposal, but they determine the real cost of ownership over time.
So, is connectivity a commodity?
In a nutshell, the technology and the pricing might look the same. But the service isn’t. And despite all the talk of commoditisation, that’s still where the real differentiation is - and where there’s still a long way to go.
If you’re buying connectivity purely on speed and price, you’re optimising for the least important variables. The real test of a provider is how they behave when something goes wrong.
If you’re reviewing connectivity providers or questioning whether service is really adding value, we’re always happy to compare notes — no pitch, just perspective.
