Connections drive growth. Roman and Inca roads, the Mongol horse relay, naval signals and, eventually, the global telegraph network were all essential for the success of their civilisations because knowledge is power.

For 100 years, Britain led the world because Britons were the first to know.

The success of 20th-century Britain relied on a groundbreaking underwater network of thousands of miles of copper cables: the All Red Line, completed in 1902 by the Eastern Telegraph Company, connecting every territory of the Empire back to London.

Fast-forward a century and things couldn’t be more different. The country that wired the planet can no longer connect itself.

A few months ago, I left Paris on the Eurostar with a stack of work for the way home. French countryside rolled by, yet I noticed nothing beyond my laptop screen. Fields that we’d fought over a century ago flew by unnoticed. I had my head down, slogging away, until we emerged, blinking, from the tunnel.

That’s when I stopped to look up. Not because I wanted to, but because I was forced to. From the Channel coast to London, my phone signal came and went. Uninterrupted telephone calls were impossible, and the internet was non-existent.

That’s not just true of Kent. Just over a week ago, I was in Dulwich, one of the wealthiest corners of London, the world’s financial capital. I had an afternoon’s work and a phone to do it on, but managed nothing because the signal was useless.

In my experience, the capital today has worse connections than Kabul did when I was based there with the British Army over a decade ago. And I’m not alone in noticing.

After my day in Dulwich, I posted about it on X. Hundreds of people replied, reporting similar experiences. A campaign group, Buffering Britain, was set up this year to tackle this growing problem.

To understand how we got here, I must first explain that all mobile signals work in the same basic way: your phone communicates with nearby radio towers using invisible radio waves. Standard mobile reception allows you to text and make calls, while more recent signals like 3G, 4G and 5G allow devices to connect to the internet. But all come from the same cell towers.

Each cell tower contains multiple antennas, with each one transmitting a different type of signal or frequency band. Your phone connects to the antenna and frequency that best matches your network and device.

Several mobile networks can also use the same tower. While the mast is shared, each provider broadcasts on its own licensed frequencies, allowing EE, Vodafone, O2 and Three customers to connect to the same structure without their signals becoming mixed up.

But the power of the signals received on your phone is based on your location and, crucially, network congestion.

That’s why, if you’re amid the crush of a sold-out stadium, or at a music festival in a remote field, the local network may buckle under the strain – leaving users with a patchy phone signal.

But increasingly, this is happening in less crowded spaces too, leaving us without network reception in a traffic jam, in major cities and on commuter trains.

The data confirms it. A report by network testing specialist MedUX carried out in 2024 ranked London rock bottom for overall 5G mobile service in a list of 15 major cities in Europe, branding its speed, reliability and availability ‘sub-par’ compared with cities such as Stockholm, Porto, Copenhagen, Paris, Munich and Berlin.

According to the network coverage mapper Streetwave, only 55 per cent of Britain’s land mass has acceptable coverage.

The UK ranks 59th in the world for mobile download speeds, behind Kazakhstan, Peru and Vietnam. South Korea’s network is three times faster than ours.

What has gone wrong? Surely the UK, a G7 country without a major war in almost a century, can’t struggle where Afghanistan, hardly the poster child of development, has succeeded? Well, it can. And the explanation is down to the same reason so much else in our national life is paralysed: planning.

Britain’s planning system makes new masts extraordinarily difficult to build. The overall planning approval rate in England is 86 per cent but for telecom masts, it is just 51 per cent.

In some local authorities, rejection rates exceed 80 per cent. Even successful applications can take months, with some known to take up to 500 days.

And that’s not taking into account the applications abandoned before the process has even started, thanks to the risk of rejection. Too often, angry neighbours are louder than the wider community who would benefit from a new mast.

The path of least resistance, therefore, is for local politicians to oppose new masts. Those rejections are made easier partly because of how we measure coverage. An area can count as ‘covered’ even if mobile data is very slow, simply because it is technically possible to connect to the phone network there.

Worse, masts can be easily torn down by land developers and only need replacing within three years.

State control and taxes strangulate mast companies and mobile networks, too, making it ever more difficult for them to invest in new infrastructure.

This ludicrous web of state intervention is not just killing an industry, it’s killing our country.

None of this is inevitable. In France, for example, the regulator demands networks maintain coverage along high-speed train lines with fibre laid into the tracks.

Nor are our troubles down to the decision to remove China’s Huawei from our networks. France did the same. They started ripping Huawei out in 2021, but their network is still better than ours.

So what can we do?

First, we must grant automatic planning permission. If mobile operators see the need for a mast, planning should be granted – unless there are novel and distinct grounds for objecting.

Second, we need shared access. Network Rail has been in public ownership for years and my proposal is simple: when a track will be closed for planned work,

network operators should have guaranteed rights of access to upgrade equipment on the network. If we’re paying for that disruption already, we should be able to benefit from better connectivity after the work is done.

The Government will point to Project Reach, its partnership with Network Rail and private firms to do exactly that. But it covers only the East Coast, West Coast and Great Western lines, leaving South Eastern Main Line, the route through my own constituency and the gateway to the Continent, with nothing. That must change.

My last demand is for the Government to put a minister in charge of the rollout – this isn’t a question of technology but of will.

None of this needs the Treasury. It simply needs ministers to accept that phone signal sits alongside water and power as the basic plumbing of national life.

It could not be more critical as Britain modernises. Waymo, the self-driving car company, is planning to launch in London later this year – something that could be hampered by the city’s poor signal. In the countryside too, the self-steering tractors that are crucial to modern farming cannot work without decent connection.

BT reckons a full 5G rollout could add £230billion to the economy by 2035. But the truth is, it could unlock growth beyond that.

We led the world once because we chose to connect – and our failure to keep up is costing us all.

Tom Tugendhat is the former Conservative security minister.