Building a backbone for UK digital innovation

Strong head­winds and eco­nom­ic chal­lenges – from sup­ply chain issues to slow­downs – have bat­tered busi­ness­es in the last few years. Run­ning a suc­cess­ful busi­ness requires those in charge to stay ahead of the curve. The prob­lem? That curve keeps get­ting steep­er.

Com­pe­ti­tion is con­stant­ly ris­ing, and uncer­tain­ty is every­where. The last cou­ple of years have shown how impor­tant it is that tech­nol­o­gy keeps us con­nect­ed – not just for the econ­o­my and the busi­ness­es with­in it to thrive, but so that we can thrive as humans too. 

“The more busi­ness­es can be con­nect­ed and exploit dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, the greater the chances of us increas­ing our pro­duc­tiv­i­ty,” says Ed Stain­ton, direc­tor of major gov­ern­ment at BT’s Enter­prise unit. That’s vital at a time when the UK lan­guish­es behind its com­peti­tors on the inter­na­tion­al stage: the aver­age out­put per work­er in the G7 coun­tries exclud­ing the UK is 13% high­er than the UK’s aver­age out­put per work­er.

The rea­sons for that com­par­a­tive slug­gish­ness are var­ied. But con­nec­tiv­i­ty is key. “We still have some way to go on the dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture side to make sure we have the best-con­nect­ed econ­o­my,” says Stain­ton. Ensur­ing our dig­i­tal back­bone is stur­dy is cru­cial to the future suc­cess of the coun­try, he argues. 

“Dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies allow busi­ness­es to run in more effi­cient ways,” says Stain­ton. “There are still pock­ets out there where busi­ness­es are quite behind the dig­i­tal curve. And to be a real­ly mod­ern, for­ward-lean­ing soci­ety and glob­al play­er, tech­nol­o­gy has to be at the heart of that.”

The keystone for growth

Dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies have become more impor­tant in the last few years as their poten­tial expands. “There is so much more you can now do with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies, which then demands a greater reliance on the under­ly­ing infra­struc­ture,” says Stain­ton – point­ing to the exam­ple of edge com­put­ing as inte­gral to max­imis­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) for com­pa­nies, speed­ing up queries and response times through low-laten­cy, high-speed archi­tec­ture. 

But it’s not just busi­ness­es that are increas­ing­ly reliant on an advanced dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture. “Even as con­sumers, we’re now using huge amounts of data, whether upload­ing to the cloud, shar­ing images and that sort of thing,” says Stain­ton. 

The shift to cloud com­put­ing and stor­age exerts a huge demand on the under­ly­ing infra­struc­ture that keeps us con­nect­ed, both because of the increased vol­umes of data servers are expect­ed to han­dle, and because of their always-on nature. It’s also a tech­nol­o­gy that busi­ness­es feel can help them unlock their poten­tial. 

“We’ve seen a lot of busi­ness­es adopt a cloud-native, cloud-first strat­e­gy,” says Stain­ton. How­ev­er, that requires much more assur­ance of con­tin­ued uptime and safe­ty for the data stored in the cloud – some­thing that can only be pro­vid­ed in a coun­try with sig­nif­i­cant, stur­dy dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture.

A strong tech­no­log­i­cal back­bone is at the core of dig­i­tal inno­va­tion. It’s the dri­ver of mod­erni­sa­tion, and the spark that can trans­form key indus­tries and boost growth with­in the UK dig­i­tal econ­o­my. And it’s becom­ing ever more impor­tant in all our lives. 

“The pan­dem­ic was an inter­est­ing inflec­tion point, for the impor­tance of the dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture, reach­ing into peo­ple’s homes rather than just pure­ly busi­ness-to-busi­ness infra­struc­ture,” says Stain­ton. “We had to go pret­ty much overnight from that B2B envi­ron­ment to a ful­ly dis­ag­gre­gat­ed mod­el, where every­body needs to con­nect and have high­ly reli­able band­width and speed.”

Never standing still

One of the key providers of that dig­i­tal back­bone that keeps the coun­try stand­ing is BT. “Our her­itage is as an infra­struc­ture play­er,” says Stain­ton. For more than 100 years since its foun­da­tion as the Gen­er­al Post Office, BT has been involved in pro­vid­ing and main­tain­ing crit­i­cal nation­al infra­struc­ture for the gov­ern­ment. 

BT was there to lay the first sub­sea cable to con­nect the front­lines to the home front in the First World War, and invent­ed ear­ly warn­ing blimps in the Sec­ond World War. The Min­istry of Defence and the police rely on its uptime for crit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions, as well as thou­sands of busi­ness­es across the coun­try and mil­lions of cus­tomers.

But ensur­ing we’re all kept con­nect­ed and at the bleed­ing edge of inno­va­tion means nev­er stand­ing still. “We’re invest­ing quite heav­i­ly in this space,” says Stain­ton. “We feel that as a nation­al tel­co and a nation­al cham­pi­on, we should be step­ping up and help­ing in those key areas.”

The UK shows promis­ing lev­els of inno­va­tion, scor­ing above the EU aver­age on the Euro­pean Commission’s Euro­pean Inno­va­tion Score­board 2021. The next gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture pro­vides an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to super­charge the nation’s future out­puts.

Connected cargo

One exam­ple of how a dig­i­tal­ly-enabled Britain can be bol­stered by its smart back­bone is BT’s work sup­port­ing British ports in the post-Brex­it econ­o­my. At the Port of Tyne, BT has part­nered with the own­ers to install a new 5G pri­vate net­work and oth­er cut­ting-edge sur­veil­lance and smart tech­nol­o­gy. 

The instal­la­tion of 5G at the port enables its own­ers and cus­tomers who pass their prod­ucts through the Tyne to take advan­tage of tech­nol­o­gy, includ­ing robot­ics, autonomous vehi­cles, AI and inter­net of things (IoT) appli­ca­tions.

BT’s pri­vate net­work, installed across the Port of Tyne area, pro­vides wire­less 5G cel­lu­lar cov­er­age – both indoors and out­doors. It keeps data secure but offers ultra-low laten­cy pro­cess­ing that can ensure smart meters and IoT sen­sors can mon­i­tor and track process­es for effi­cien­cy, giv­ing those run­ning the port insight into what’s work­ing – and what’s not. Every crane that moves car­goes can be tracked; every ship­ping con­tain­er offloaded can be mon­i­tored as it moves through the port. 

“5G is big news for our indus­try,” says Stain­ton. “It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly just increased band­width, it fun­da­men­tal­ly means we can pro­vide agile, cus­tomised net­work expe­ri­ences to our cus­tomers, which, in turn, means that they can start deliv­er­ing new forms of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion above where they are today.”

To find out more, vis­it business.bt.com