The internet in the rain

Picture it. A storm tearing across the fens, power lines bowing like penitents, and somewhere on a half-drowned back road a battered van idles. Inside, an engineer pulls on his boots, shoulders his gear, and steps out into the weather. The “cloud,” that ethereal realm where we imagine our lives suspended, is in fact ladders, mud, and wet cables. It is flesh and steel, petrol and grit.

We like to imagine the internet as invisible, a kind of magic mist that drifts serenely above us. In truth, it is a body - heavy, stubborn, and soaked to the skin.

But customers don’t think in mud. They think in metaphors of purity: water from the tap, light from the switch. They expect the internet to flow like a utility, constant and unquestioned. When it falters, it is not treated as a hiccup but as a betrayal. The delay is not merely technical; it is personal. And every hour of silence compounds the grievance, curdling patience into anger.

Here enters the grand compromise. Regulators grant exemptions - “matters beyond our reasonable control,” tidy acronyms like MBORC that suspend targets and absolve penalties. Yet the customer does not live inside the regulator’s spreadsheet. No homeowner has ever stood in a cold house, unable to send an email, and thought, “Well, at least this outage is covered under the regulatory framework.” The truth is harsher: service levels are not built to succeed. They are designed to fail gracefully, engineered as an economic settlement between state and company. Dimension for every storm, every surge, every act of God, and you build a network too costly for mortals to afford.

And yet the delivery machine itself is anything but complacent. Openreach has already rolled fibre past millions of premises, at a pace few thought possible. It is one of the fastest national deployments in Europe - an industrial campaign of staggering scale, tens of thousands of jobs a week, logistics chains humming like wartime supply lines. This is heroism measured not in headlines but in homes connected. The frustration is not that the machine fails; it is that even such extraordinary delivery cannot completely outrun the compromises baked into the copper system.

And so BT occupies a twilight role. A company that must act like a national utility while living on the rations of a private firm. It is judged not by its balance sheets but by its ability to comfort a nation that confuses connectivity with oxygen. The disappointment seeps in, year upon year, becoming not just a bad quarter or a bad headline, but a drag on the very idea of trust.

The answer is not more trucks in storms. Not more ingenious weather forecasts. No - this is not a problem of logistics but of architecture. Fibre is not just faster internet. It is operational salvation: a network that tames volatility, reduces truck rolls, and spares engineers the midnight climb in the rain. And the good news is that it is already happening. Each new line laid narrows the canyon between expectation and reality, promise and performance.

The hard truth is this: the internet does not float. It does not hover, ethereal, above our heads. It lives in sodden trenches, in brittle joints, in tired engineers standing in the rain at midnight. And until fibre replaces copper root and branch, our strategies, our brands, and our promises will remain what they have always been: dimensioned to disappoint.