This budget season, fund the proof

It is budget season, and connectivity is once again being treated as a line to trim. Fewer sites, a cheaper circuit, a harder squeeze on the contract. All defensible, and all slightly beside the point.

Because the question a budget is meant to answer is not “how little can we spend on the network.” It is “is the network carrying the work we depend on.” Most organisations set next year’s number without being able to answer that. They know, to the penny, what they pay. They have far less idea whether what they pay for is actually working.

We treat those as two separate conversations. Finance owns the invoice; operations owns the uptime. Rarely does anyone put the two together and ask the more useful question: is the money buying the performance the business needs? A company can have perfectly reconciled bills and still run, every week, on links that quietly underperform, costing productivity in ways that never appear on a statement.

The reason the gap persists is simple. We fund what we can see. Billing is easy to see, so it gets scrutinised. Performance is harder to see, so it gets assumed. And a budget built on assumption is a budget built on hope.

So here is the line I would fund this year: the ability to prove what the network actually delivers. Not more capacity, not a lower price, but the evidence to know whether the connectivity you already pay for is doing its job, day in and day out. You cannot manage, defend or reclaim what you cannot measure.

That is the argument I will be making at Capacity Europe next week: that the value in this industry is moving from the circuit to the proof over it. But you do not need to be in the room to act on it. You need only ask, as the numbers get set for next year, one question you probably cannot yet answer: are you as confident that your network is working as you are in what it costs?

Fund the answer to that. The rest of the budget gets easier once you can see it.

Toby Forman, Group CEO