INDUSTRY EVENTS
Who are the key sponsors this year? We’ve got a really good following from our traditional sponsors, like Nokia and Hexatronic who have supported us for many, many years. We’ve also got great support from some of the telcos or the altnets themselves. CityFibre are a sponsor, Virgin Media Business are sponsors. What’s interesting this year is some of the new sponsors that stand out - Cisco, Dell, Nvidia and Visa. You wouldn’t look at them and think, well they’re fibre companies; people used to say that all our exhibitors were fibre companies and they’re certainly not now. Dell and Nvidia are very much talking about AI and data centres and digital infrastructure in the wider sense. Cisco obviously one of those companies that could pretty much build a network from scratch. It’s a much more rounded representation of the connectivity landscape.
more and more about how connectivity is being used rather than just how they build out the connectivity. That’s the main take away, that the evolution of the market is ongoing. There’s a lot of energy, people are very enthusiastic, I think people are confident of the ongoing strength of the market. There’s a lot to be excited about. What are the major trends this year on connectivity? Increased focus on mobile technologies. But the big one and is no surprise to everyone is AI. Virtually every stand has AI on it. And then you can connect into that what people are doing around data centres and building out a digital technology. The opportunities that technology offers to the UK as a whole, that’s really the big overriding theme for me.
www.terrapinn.com/conference/ connected-britain/
What are the headline numbers for this year?
The number we’ve been publishing for people is 8,000 attending. And we’re middle of day one at the moment and we’re well north of five and a half thousand here on site. That would be putting us up probably 10% growth in people year-on-year from last year. And about 300 exhibitors, partners and start-ups. So, there’s some big headline numbers in there. What do you think the attendees or wider industry should take away from Connected Britain this year? Mainly, that the industry is very obviously in good health. There has been a lot of talk all year that the market had perhaps topped out, talk of consolidation, problems with smaller altnets, issues on refinancing. There’s still talk of consolidation, but it’s really the stage of evolution, if you like, of the fibre roll-out. It will happen, but it doesn’t mean there’s a problem in the industry, far from it. The industry is very healthy. There’s new companies, there’s new technologies coming into the market here wanting to talk about what they do. And they’re wanting to talk
Volume 47 No.4 DECEMBER 2025
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