Why The Digital Infrastructure Gap Is Now A Problem For London’s Office Landlords

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01 May 2026

London's office stock scores well on cyber resilience – but digital readiness is quietly undermining asset values. William Newton, CEO at WiredScore,  explains why connectivity has become a landlord problem.

London ranks 11th in WiredScore's new Global Cities Resilience Index. That sounds respectable – until you look closer.

Our report measures a city's resilience across three preparedness factors – physical, digital, and cyber. 

London's commercial stock performs well on cyber resilience but falls short on digital readiness. For those responsible for managing and investing in the city's office stock, that distinction matters more than the headline number. Cyber resilience may be improving, but the infrastructure that supports everyday digital performance is not keeping pace.

For facilities and asset management teams, that imbalance is becoming increasingly visible – and increasingly material to asset performance.

This is not just a story about Wi-Fi speeds or AI compatibility. It’s about whether London's built environment can meet the expectations of occupiers moving in today. 

The Shift Nobody Announced
For most of the last two decades, connectivity within London’s office stock was treated as a tenant amenity.

It rarely appeared in investment appraisals, and connectivity was largely treated as the occupier's responsibility, with tenants often left to work out how to get connected on their own.

But today, this framing no longer holds weight. What’s changed hasn’t been a single event but a quiet accumulation of dependencies, which in turn has redefined what digital resilience now means.

Over the past decade, ‘digital transformation’ has been the catch-all term used to describe the dependencies that landlords had to become mindful of; workflows needed to be migrated to the cloud, video became the default medium for communication, building management systems went digital, and so forth.

At the same time, building owners have made steady progress in another dimension of technological resilience: cyber security.

London’s office stock scores 74% for cyber resilience in the Global Cities Resilience Index, making it the second strongest of the city’s three resilience pillars – though still five percentage points below the global benchmark of 79%. At first glance, this suggests a relative maturity in cyber practices across the city’s buildings.

Look closer, however, and the picture shifts. Much of this strength reflects policy adoption rather than consistent implementation. The challenge now is ensuring those protections are tested and governed at the portfolio level.

In other words, cyber resilience is improving – but the physical infrastructure required to support increasingly digital workplaces has not advanced at the same pace.

Redefining Digital Resilience for Today
The smart revolution — connected tech, IoT, and artificial intelligence — has redefined digital resilience. Buildings must now support connectivity, energy, and cooling demands required to support this technology.

One area that has failed to keep up with evolving occupier expectations is indoor mobile performance, which remains inconsistent: in-building mobile performance lags behind external network capability in around 35% of the world's smartest buildings. The issue is already visible in the UK, where 87% of organisations report daily disruption caused by poor indoor connectivity, and studies suggest nearly half of office workers struggle to access reliable mobile signal in their workspace. In London specifically, the challenge is even more apparent; a benchmark study ranked the city last among 15 major European cities for overall 5G service.

For years, this gap was partially masked by legacy 2G and 3G networks, whose lower-frequency signals penetrated buildings more effectively than modern 4G and 5G services. As operators retire those networks, buildings that once appeared to function normally are beginning to see those underlying connectivity weaknesses exposed.

Layer onto that the rapid adoption of AI-enabled tools. Our data shows that 81% of occupiers now expect AI to be embedded into daily workflows. 

The bandwidth implications are significant, and tolerance for patchy indoor connectivity has fallen accordingly. 

In other words, the definition of a “digitally resilient” building has shifted. It is no longer simply about whether connectivity exists, but whether it performs reliably under the demands of modern occupier technology.

And now the connectivity infrastructure question that once seemed theoretical has become the most pressing operational issue of the moment.

When Performance Data Enters the Underwriting Model
The strongest signal that digital infrastructure has crossed from amenity into asset management territory is what WiredScore's performance data now shows across certified buildings.

London offices with strong, certified digital connectivity command a 4.1% rental premium over comparable uncertified stock. Lease terms in digitally certified buildings average nine months longer. Where dedicated indoor mobile systems are in place, vacancy rates run up to 50% lower.

These figures reflect how occupier decision-making has already incorporated digital infrastructure into how leases are agreed – and at what price. Investors and their advisors should be incorporating the same logic into how they model risk and income.

The buildings showing up as underperformers in this analysis are not failing on any traditional metric. Many are well-located, well-managed, and well-presented. 

The gap is narrower than that. It is the gap between how a building looks and how it performs digitally.

London's Particular Vulnerability
Every major office market faces some version of this challenge. London's is more acute for specific reasons.

A substantial portion of the city's office stock predates mobile networks entirely. Many of the buildings that define the most prestigious addresses in the City and the West End were not designed with in-building signal distribution in mind. 

Dense urban canyons complicate outdoor signal penetration further. The gap between a building's visual quality and its digital performance can be significant – and increasingly, occupiers have the tools to measure it before they sign.

The Global Cities Resilience Index reflects that structural reality. London scores just 59% for digital resilience, placing it outside the top tier of global office markets. In a world where occupier expectations for connectivity and reliability are rapidly converging, that position warrants greater attention.

The window for Getting Ahead is Narrowing
The good news is that technical solutions exist. Dedicated indoor mobile systems – Distributed Antenna Systems and small cell networks, for instance – can remediate poor in-building coverage in most environments. 

Third-party certification creates a verifiable, investor-legible signal of digital performance that increasingly stands out in procurement diligence processes. 

And despite London’s ageing office stock and vanishingly scarce amount of space for new builds, the remedy does not necessarily require rebuilding. 

Digital upgrades are often far less invasive than major physical refurbishments – but their impact on occupier experience can be just as significant.

Digital infrastructure, therefore, should be considered as a fabric, not furniture.

The Imperative on FMs to Lead the Way
Facilities managers are often closest to building performance reality. They see connectivity before they appear in lease negotiations and understand where digital resilience is quietly failing. 

That operational visibility makes facilities teams uniquely well-positioned to identify where digital performance gaps exist across a portfolio.

That operational knowledge is exactly what is needed to make the business case internally — to asset managers, to boards, to investors who have not yet connected the digital performance line to the income line.

London's resilience story is far from finished. 

The physical infrastructure that gives the city its strength remains a genuine asset, but resilience for modern occupiers now carries a broader meaning that owners and operators must align around. 

Picture: A headshot of William Newton, CEO at WiredScore. Credit: Stuart Bailey Photography.

Article written by William Newton | Published 01 May 2026

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