Tristan Wood is the founder and CEO of Livewire Digital, a UK-based pioneer in mission-critical connectivity for over 30 years. The company’s flagship solution, RazorLink SD-WAN, is a Software Defined Networking (SDN) platform that seamlessly bonds cellular, satellite, and terrestrial networks to create a single, resilient pipe for autonomous and safety-critical systems.
The broad conversation surrounding smart infrastructure has matured. We have moved beyond the speculative excitement of autonomous prototypes to a sobering engineering reality: the necessary integration of these systems into the critical national, and international fabric. As we transition from human-in-the-loop operations to fully autonomous ecosystems, we are witnessing a fundamental collision between two opposing paradigms.
On one side, we have the rapidly emerging requirements of the modern smart city such as connected intersections, autonomous pods, and intelligent street furniture, which will demand guaranteed uptime and latency if they are to manage traffic safely. On the other, there is today’s haphazard nature of our existing connectivity landscape, a patchwork of 'best effort' public networks designed for consumer smartphones, and definitely not prepared to support and protect safety-critical infrastructure assets.
This creates a fundamental risk. While the AI driving our infrastructure is advancing rapidly, the digital tether connecting it to the world remains inherently fragile. We are effectively trying to run mission-critical safety systems on conventional network architecture that was never built to guarantee such a high degree of uptime and resilience. Unless we bridge this gap, the UK and the world’s ambitions for a fully automated economy will work in theory but fail in practice.
To understand the stakes, we must look beyond the headline-grabbing concept of the self-driving car. The ‘smart infrastructure’ revolution is already happening in the unglamorous, mission-critical corners of our economy.
Consider the smart logistics trailer. No longer just a metal container, it is evolving into a mobile IoT hub. In projects like Trusted Bytes, we are seeing trailers equipped with local LoRaWAN networks that monitor the heartbeat of their cargo such as temperature, humidity, and security seals in real time. These trailers act as ‘motherships’, collecting mission-critical data from hundreds of low-power sensors and backhauling it to the cloud.
Similarly, look at the connected construction site or the remote utility substation. Here, a rapidly deployable communications control hub acts as the site’s nervous system, aggregating environmental data and asset tracking information. In these scenarios, the network is not a static cable in the ground; it is a dynamic, moving bubble of connectivity. If that bubble bursts because a trailer moves into a cellular dead zone, the entire digital operation goes dark.
The £520bn economic imperative
The stakes are high. The UK Government recently highlighted Advanced Connectivity Technologies (ACT) as a frontier technology with significant growth potential in its Digital and Technologies Sector Plan. These technologies are to be the backbone of the critical national infrastructure that is essential to support how we live and work.
Estimates suggest that by 2030, digitalisation enabled by AI could contribute £520 billion to the UK economy. However, leveraging this for economic growth is only possible if we invest in the networks that power it. As global competition accelerates, we must prioritise our infrastructure with the urgency it deserves. We cannot simply wait for 2035 to arrive, and moreover in such uncertain times, geopolitically, we need sovereign capabilities to drive that growth.
We must be realistic about where we stand. Have we yet realised the full potential of 5G? Organisations such as Digital Catapult have been building the case for 5G innovation since 2014, yet barriers to adoption still remain. The deployment of 5G Standalone (5G SA), which delivers the true enhancements necessary for vertical industry adoption, has been slower than anticipated, and in several cases do not provide better services than 4G despite the original promises[MF1] .
The LEO paradox
Parallel to the 5G debate, the rise of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations, such as Starlink and OneWeb, has seduced many into believing the connectivity problem is solved. These services are undeniably transformative, offering high-speed, low-latency access in regions previously cut off from the grid. However, for mobile autonomy to succeed and be scalable, LEOs on their own present a dangerous option. While they can excel in open rural environments, they are compromised by ‘urban canyons’. A satellite receiver requires a clear, wide arc of visibility to the sky. In a dense city, flanked by steel and glass skyscrapers, or even on a tree-lined avenue, that line of sight is repeatedly severed.
Furthermore, while median latency has improved, LEO networks are still subject to ‘jitter’, variable latency spikes caused by satellite handovers and network congestion. For a Netflix user, this is imperceptible. For a vital control system making safety-critical decisions every millisecond, it is a single point of potential failure. We cannot simply trade the rural dead zones of cellular for the urban blind spots of satellite.
Innovating for resilience: SafeRoute-6G and 5GAA
The industry is not blind to these challenges. Significant infrastructure initiatives are currently underway attempting to solve the resilience puzzle.
One of the most prominent of these being developed in the UK and on the continent is SafeRoute-6G, in which Livewire Digital is involved, a €9.3 million European initiative led by Celtic Next and supported by global technology partners, including UKRI. This Eureka project is developing a hybrid 6G framework designed to blend cellular, satellite and short-range communications. The goal is seamless connectivity for vehicles crossing borders and moving through diverse environments.
Meanwhile, in the US, the 5G Automotive Association (5GAA), a coalition of global heavyweights including BMW, Stellantis and major telcos, is actively bridging the gap between the automotive and telecommunications sectors. In May 2025, 5GAA members successfully demonstrated connected vehicles using Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) to complement terrestrial 4G and 5G. Their ‘2030 Roadmap’ explicitly identifies the need for satellite integration to ensure ubiquitous connectivity for safety-critical messaging.
These and other similar projects are illustrating how the world’s automotive and highways industries are recognising the issue: a single network technology is insufficient.
The great hybrid misconception
As we look toward 6G, and the convergence of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, ‘hybrid connectivity’ is emerging as the key that can unlock this problem. It promises the best of all worlds: enhanced reliability, flexibility and performance.
In the classic networking approach, most systems, including many demonstrated in recent trials, rely on failover. Failover is the ability of a system to switch to a backup connection when the primary one fails. While this offers a basic level of redundancy, it is not hybrid. It is sequential. It is the digital equivalent of a backup generator kicking in after the lights have already gone out.
The solution: true hybrid connectivity
To secure the future of smart infrastructure and unlock that £520 billion economic potential, we must move from failover to bonding. True hybrid, or more correctly ‘a heterogeneous’ network approach, is where multiple network technologies work together simultaneously, bonding cellular, LEO satellites, Wi-Fi and WAN, and aggregating them into a single, resilient pipe.
In a truly hybrid environment, the system does not wait for one connection to fail before utilising another. It actively shares the load across all available bearers, combining the high bandwidth of terrestrial networks with the ubiquitous availability of satellite.
In this scenario, a vehicle entering a ‘not-spot’ or a rural area does not experience a drop. The system might lose the 5G signal, but because the satellite link was already active within the bonded pipe, the data stream remains consistent.
Looking ahead
By adopting true hybrid bonding now, we can future-proof our infrastructure, creating a unified security framework where a bonded connection acts as a single, encrypted tunnel, safeguarding digital systems against cyberattacks more effectively.
We have entered an age where autonomous connected vehicles and smart sites promise safer roads and reduced congestion, but we need to think differently. Many systems currently sold as 'resilient' simply provide a backup where the switchover is measured in seconds or even minutes. This is woefully insufficient for industries that are designed and dependent on always-on, fail-safe connectivity.
We are trying to build a future that expects absolute certainty on a network architecture founded on best effort and hope. It is an engineering paradox that artificial intelligence alone cannot resolve. The answer lies in a new approach, one that mathematically flattens the chaos of fluctuating signals into a stable, unified connection.
This is the philosophy behind our approach at Livewire Digital: moving beyond the illusion of 'failover' to the reality of bonding. The £520 billion prize is there for the taking, but it demands an uncomfortable admission: that in a mission-critical world, 'best effort' is no longer good enough.