Last week, the Telegraph reported a headline that should stop every policymaker in their tracks: “Mobile data could be rationed to tackle soaring costs of Iran war.”
The instinct will be to debate whether they should have been included in the Chancellor’s Industrial Competitiveness Scheme. That’s the wrong conversation.
Because the real question this headline forces is a more uncomfortable one: why, in 2026, in one of the largest economies in the world, is “rationing” even a word we’re applying to connectivity? And why are we still relying on commercial operators — whose first obligation is to shareholders, not citizens — to deliver what is, by any reasonable measure, essential public infrastructure?
This isn’t a case for bailing out the companies, considering rationing. It’s a case for building infrastructure they can’t ration.
Connectivity is not a commodity
When we treat connectivity as a commodity, it behaves like one. Prices rise with energy costs. Speeds throttle when margins tighten. The first to be cut off are the people who can least afford it.
But connectivity in 2026 isn’t a commodity. It’s the road network of the information economy — and we wouldn’t privatise the roads and then shrug when the company couldn’t afford the tarmac. It’s how your GP issues prescriptions. It’s how a child in a rural village does their homework. It’s how a pensioner books a benefits appointment, and how a small business takes a card payment. The UN
recognised meaningful internet access as a human right a decade ago. Our infrastructure hasn’t caught up with that recognition.
The cost of being cut off is real and measurable. Research suggests households without reliable connectivity can be up to £500 a year worse off – shut out of online deals, cheaper tariffs, banking apps, and benefits portals. 2.1 million UK households are still in that position today. Rationing data makes that worse, not better.
Leaving their access in the hands of operators who may ration data to protect margins makes that worse, not better.
The answer isn’t to subsidise those operators. It’s to invest in infrastructure that operates on entirely different principles.
Meanwhile, in the town halls
While national operators warn of rationing, a very different story is unfolding in local government and it deserves far more attention than it’s getting
Last year, Newcastle City Council launched one of the UK’s most ambitious council-led WiFi networks — a unified, secure, public-private system – built with us at Purple. Residents, students, visitors and businesses share one seamless network that roams across council buildings, libraries, gyms, public spaces and hundreds of local venues. No repeat sign-ins. No postcode lottery. As Councillor Paul Frew put it at the time, not everyone can afford reliable access on the go – and the council saw that as its problem to solve. And that instinct is exactly right.
In York, council-led public WiFi is feeding footfall insights back into high-street regeneration. In Faringdon, a market town in the Vale of White Horse, that same infrastructure tells residents what’s on at the folly tower this weekend. Different scales, different places, same principle: connectivity delivered in the public interest, not as a line item on a quarterly earnings call.
This is what democratised connectivity actually looks like. It already exists. It works. The question is whether the government is prepared to back it at scale.
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Why a B Corp can’t ration you
Purple became a certified B Corporation in 2024. That’s not a logo on a brochure. It’s a legal obligation to weigh people and planet alongside profit in every material decision we make. It’s the reason we’ve given away over £120,000 of WiFi hardware and licences to 1,000 small businesses in Newcastle. It’s the reason we’re building a unified, OpenRoaming-ready network that any venue – public or private – can plug into.
But the broader point goes beyond any one provider. Council-led WiFi networks are structurally incapable of the kind of rationing we read about this week. A council partner has no share price to protect. A B Corp has a legal duty not to sacrifice people for profit. The governance of who owns and operates our digital infrastructure matters as much as the cables and the spectrum — and right now, we have the wrong owners making decisions about essential access.
What needs to change
The conversation has to move on from arguing about whether telcos should or shouldn’t get industrial electricity support. The bigger question is this: if connectivity is genuinely essential – and this week’s news makes clear it is – why is it national infrastructure where “rationing” is being floated with a shrug, rather than being treated, funded and protected as such?
Three things we need to see on the table:
• Back council-led networks as resilient public-interest infrastructure, with capital and revenue support that matches their role.
• Extend public-interest frameworks – the kind we take for granted in water, energy and rail – to the digital layer that now sits underneath all of them. Connectivity should not be the one piece of essential infrastructure where rationing is floated with a shrug.
• Partner with mission-led providers – B Corps, community networks, public-private WiFi – so the system is resilient to shocks like the one we’re reading about today, rather than dependent on the commercial decisions of operators with other priorities.
A uniquely British shrug
Imagine reading a headline that water pressure might be rationed because a utility signed a bad energy contract. Or that the rail network would slow down because of an overseas conflict. It would be a national conversation.
Connectivity deserves exactly the same treatment — and the infrastructure to back that up already exists. Councils across the UK are already showing how it’s done: publicly accountable, mission-driven, built for citizens rather than shareholders.
The question is whether Westminster is paying attention. Because the alternative — leaving essential access in the hands of operators who may ration it at will — is a choice. And this week, we’ve seen where that choice leads.
Gavin Wheeldon is CEO of Purple, the certified B Corp connectivity platform powering public-interest WiFi networks for councils, cities and venues in 89 countries.