Connectivity of the future
Plan your connectivity strategy around the devices you will connect over the next five years, not only the ones connected today.
Optimising by location
Claranet has spent the last few years working through customer estates site by site, matching each network to what the location does.
A depot needs resilience. If the systems are down, operations stop. A staff canteen needs reliable fibre with less resilience, because a short outage carries a lower cost. Applying the same standard circuit to both sites means overpaying at one and underprotecting the other.
Optimising each location against its real requirement, then standardising the technology underneath, has taken up to 50% off our customers' connectivity bills.
Availability changed the economics
Part of the saving comes from the estate. Part of it comes from the market.
Over the past few years the range of viable access technologies has widened. Full fibre broadband now reaches sites that once had only leased lines or bonded copper. 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) delivers usable primary bandwidth where a fibre build carries a heavy cost and a long lead time. Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite gives remote, rural, and temporary sites a credible circuit for the first time.
Two consequences follow.
Sites that were expensive for physical reasons are no longer expensive. Many estates still carry the circuit, and the price, agreed when nothing else was available.
Resilience can come from technology diversity rather than a second costly circuit. Fibre with 5G or LEO failover covers most site profiles for a fraction of the cost of dual fibre.
Reassessing an estate against what is available today, rather than what was available at the last renewal, is where a large share of the saving sits.
Three examples
The scenarios below are fictional. Each one is drawn closely from work we have delivered for real customers, with names, figures, and identifying detail changed.
Logistics: matching resilience to operational impact
A national logistics operator ran 140 sites on a single standard: dual circuits with 4G backup everywhere, from regional distribution hubs to small collection points and driver welfare facilities.
We assessed each location against operational impact. The 12 hubs kept full diverse resilience and gained bandwidth. Collection points moved to a single fibre circuit with 5G failover, an option that did not exist when the estate was last contracted. Welfare and training sites moved to standard business broadband.
Annual connectivity spend fell by 41%, and the hubs, where downtime actually costs money, ended up better protected than before.
Retail: standardising a fragmented estate
A retail chain with 320 stores had inherited three suppliers, four circuit types, and contracts ending on 60 different dates after a series of acquisitions.
We standardised the estate onto one technology stack with a single management layer, then aligned contract end dates to give the business one renewal point. Stores were banded by trading volume. Flagship and high-turnover sites kept diverse connectivity. Smaller sites moved to a single fibre circuit with mobile failover, and four rural stores that had been paying leased line prices moved to LEO satellite.
Connectivity spend fell by 37%. Support became simpler, because every store now runs the same technology.
Transport: building the telemetry layer
A regional transport operator is planning for data it does not yet collect. The organisation wants sensor data from stations, depots, and vehicles feeding a central data lake, which in turn feeds its AI layer for predictive maintenance and passenger flow analysis.
We are building the network underneath that: segmented device networks at each site, capacity planned for thousands of low-bandwidth connections rather than a few high-bandwidth ones, consistent technology across the estate, and commercial terms that allow sites to scale as devices are added.
The first phase covers energy and temperature monitoring across depots. Ticket machine telemetry, lift and escalator sensors, and vehicle telematics follow in later phases, and each one is a routine addition rather than a new project.
The planning question
Over the next one to five years, which devices need to be online to collect telemetry, and what does that mean for the network at each location?
That question shapes four decisions.
Capacity: hundreds of low-bandwidth devices create a different traffic profile from a handful of high-bandwidth ones, so plan for connection count as well as throughput.
Segmentation and security: operational devices belong on their own segment, designed in now rather than retrofitted later.
Standardisation: a consistent technology stack across sites keeps the cost of adding devices low.
Commercial flexibility: contract terms should allow you to scale sites up as the requirement grows, and to adopt access technologies that are not yet available at every site.
Cost now, expansion later
The exercise that removes cost from an estate is the same one that makes the estate straightforward to expand. Understanding each location, standardising the technology, and taking advantage of what the market now offers delivers both.
The risk is optimising only for this year's bill. Reducing every site to a minimum circuit on a long contract creates rework at every location once the device programme starts.
How Claranet can help
We specialise in complex connectivity requirements: multi-site estates, mixed technologies, and locations that do not fit a standard template.
We will work through your estate location by location, optimise cost against the real requirement, standardise the underlying technology, and design the network to expand as you connect more devices to feed your AI layer.
We are doing this for our customers now, and we can do it for you. To discuss your connectivity strategy, get in touch.