This week, the OECD Infrastructure Forum in Paris brought the resilience of infrastructure to the center of the international policy debate. One of its panels, ‘Enhancing the resilience of digital infrastructure: investing in the future’, gathered experts from industry and regulatory bodies, including Alix Jagueneau of GSMA, who offered the mobile industry’s perspective. The discussion shows how digital resilience has moved from a technical concern for operators to a shared priority for governments, regulators and industry, and it provides useful context for the reflections that follow.
If we define resilience as the ability to ensure continuity of service, we can appreciate that creating and maintaining resilient digital infrastructures is a key priority, not only from an economic perspective, but from a strategic and social one as well. The importance of having resilient digital infrastructures is not in dispute.
This is reflected everywhere, from NATO’s 2026 Resilience Baseline Requirements that identify ‘Resilient Civil Communications Systems’ as a critical component of societal resilience, to draft legislation in Spain that would oblige operators to maintain four hours of coverage for 75% of the population in case of a power grid failure.
Why is resilient digital infrastructure more important now than ever?
Digital infrastructure has never been more vital. The first reason for this is that as digitalization across developed and developing economies increases, digital infrastructure has become a bedrock for growth, competitiveness and efficiency in both the public and private sectors. The international industry association representing the mobile communications ecosystem estimates that the telecommunication sector added over 7 trillion dollars to the global economy in 2025, or 6.4% of GDP. Essentially, modern economies require digital infrastructure to remain relevant in an age of rapidly accelerating technological advancement.
The second reason is that just as our dependencies on digital infrastructures have grown, so too have the risks posed to these infrastructures. AI enabled cyberattacks mean the scale, scope and speed of such attacks are reaching unprecedented levels, requiring greater investment, technical skills and foresight to deal with.
Moreover, climate change raises the likelihood of extreme weather events that often wreak significant damage on critical infrastructures. To illustrate, GSMA calculates that severe storms and floods cost mobile operators $1.7 billion annually in repairs and replacement, and that these costs could nearly double to more than $3 billion a year by 2050. Across more than 50 countries, major storms and floods coincided with about 150 telecom outages a year between 2022 and 2024, affecting just under 215 million users annually.
Put simply, as the risk environment grows more complex, so does the importance of doubling down on building resilient digital infrastructure.
What can be done to strengthen digital infrastructure resilience?
Having established that a consensus exists around both the importance of resilient digital infrastructure and the growing dangers said infrastructure faces, what generates discussion is how best to create conditions and implement solutions that would most effectively boost digital resilience. The OECD panel offered several useful perspectives on this question.
GSMA’s contribution came days after the launch of its new policy principles on mobile network resilience, which set out five priorities: avoiding prescriptive regulation in favor of outcome-based policy that supports sustained investment; building upon resilience by design; consulting early and designing with operational reality in mind; developing resilience policy as a cross-sector responsibility; and enhancing trust through clarity, transparency and continuity.
A point that emerged is that the cross-border, cross-sector nature of digital infrastructure means no one stakeholder can be held fully responsible for ensuring resilience. Just as the effects of interrupted service ripples across society, entities across society must coordinate and cooperate to protect digital infrastructures. This means regular and embedded consultation between governments and industry, regulators and operators.
This shared responsibility should also reflect the nature and origin of the risks involved. Resilience measures are most effective and balanced when responsibilities are addressed at source, with each sector primarily responsible for the continuity and resilience of the essential services it provides. In the case of power disruptions, for example, measures to strengthen the resilience of the electricity system remain fundamental, with energy sector actors playing a central role in ensuring continuity of supply, only complemented where appropriate by proportionate preparedness measures by other agents, such as telecommunications operators.
Turning specifically to the telecommunications sector, planning and ingraining genuine redundancy into digital infrastructures is another fundamental pillar of resilience. For example, the current concentration of submarine cable routes at certain geographic points highlights the importance of greater route diversity and redundancy. It is therefore important to understand potential dependencies and risk concentrations and take them into account in resilience planning before a crisis arises. Again, this requires close coordination, risk assessments and preparation between governments and operators. Beyond simply having backups, it is also important to frequently test these backups during exercises to guarantee they will work as designed during emergencies. As a panelist noted, “resilience cannot be improvised.”
In addition to coordination and planning, the centrality of funding often came up during the OECD panel. Once more, public-private collaboration was pointed to as being indispensable. While the private sector is naturally responsible for building and operating digital infrastructures, the public sector has an important role to play in creating the conditions that can encourage investment into the sector. This can be achieved by creating a predictable, streamlined regulatory framework that focuses on outcomes rather than prescriptive technical solutions. Furthermore, governments can use initial, ‘catalytic’ investments to ‘crowd in’ private money by making digital infrastructures more attractive investment opportunities.
This public-private partnership on funding is critical, because without it private companies will struggle to simultaneously meet the costs of basic resilience requirements as well as adequately invest in innovation. In a worst-case scenario, companies could end up sacrificing resilience for innovation, or vice versa. To avoid facing such a tradeoff, the public and private sectors should come together to work out a mutually beneficial agreement.
Finally, given the potentially catastrophic impact of natural disasters, early warning systems regarding these can be very helpful. Initiatives such as the ‘Early Warnings for All’ by the UN, for example, aim to achieve universal protection from hazardous hydrometeorological, climatological and related environmental events through life-saving early warning systems by the end of 2027.
As our economies and societies depend more and more on connectivity, resilience must become a shared strategic priority. Governments, regulators and industry need to work together to identify vulnerabilities, build genuine redundancy, test preparedness and enable sustained investment. A predictable, flexible framework can ensure that Europe’s digital infrastructure withstands today’s risks while supporting tomorrow’s technologies and economic opportunities, without having to choose between resilience and innovation.
