Why staying put isn’t a strategy – the risks of inaction for your ISP

If your ISP business is still running on disconnected tools and mostly manual workflows, you’re not alone, as for many small and mid-sized operators, it’s the norm, and it works well enough. But in today’s dynamic and fast moving market, staying where you are means that in real terms, you’re actually going backwards.

In this blog, we unpack what you stand to lose by delaying digital transformation, from declining customer satisfaction to limiting growth potential, and why now is the time to act.

The world around you is changing — fast

The telecoms landscape is shifting fast. Larger providers are doubling down on customer experience and new digital-first challengers are entering the market with sleek portals, fast provisioning, and AI-driven support. So where does that lead the existing, smaller players?

With consumer expectations having been reset by Amazon, Netflix, and Uber towards an expectation for instant, intuitive, and always-on service delivery, if you’re still relying on spreadsheets and outdated systems, you’re not just falling back into the pack, you’ve already been left behind.

Inaction creates technical debt

Every time you delay updating systems or consolidating operations, you accumulate technical debt — a term that encapsulates an invisible, compounding of the inefficiencies that cost your business in multiple ways, over time.

This head in the sand approach results in scenarios likely familiar to the small telco operator such as; legacy systems becoming harder to maintain; fragmentation and subsequent inaccuracies amongst data sets; increased lead-time for staff training; and the nightmare of having to try and assimilate new elements to your computerised house of cards. Put in start terms, the longer you wait, the harder (and costlier) it will get to modernise.

You’ll miss growth opportunities

Let’s say a new wholesale fibre partner enters your region. Can you launch and provision a new package quickly? Or does it take months of system rewiring, staff training, and workarounds? What about adding to or changing your customer routers or selling a new bolt-on app?

ISPs that can’t move fast to satisfy new customer needs or opportunities, miss out on new revenue streams. Digital transformation isn’t just about survival, but about unlocking agility, and a unified, automated platform makes it easy to launch, sell, and support new services as market needs change.

Operational overhead creeps in

Manual work doesn’t scale, with every new customer meaning more admin, more tickets, and ultimately, more delays. When you rely on people to do things systems could handle automatically, two things happen; costs go up and there’s the increased possibility of an uptick in human error.

This unnecessary reliance on human ownership of repetitive, potentially automatable task sets, affects everything from margin to morale — with staff getting bogged down in the weeds instead of adding real value.

Customer expectations are outpacing capabilities

Customers don’t care about what’s going on behind your curtain, or how hard your systems are to use. To be fair, it is not actually their problem, as they pay for an outcome, which you have to deliver irrespective of blockers, to ensure the progression of the relationship.

All customers are going to demand quick answers to questions, the ability to self-serve as required and seamless on-boarding and billing experiences for their customer bases.

If you can’t deliver these minimum expected requirements, your potential or existing customers will likely try and find someone who can. According to studies, 55% of consumers said they abandon purchases due to a poor digital experience[1],  so for an ISP relying on legacy systems, it is time to start planning for some churn and annulled on-boardings.

You may be more vulnerable to compliance and security risks

Patchworked, outdated systems often lack modern audit trails, data protection, or access controls. That can leave you, the smaller ISP, exposed to operative issues such as GDPR/data protection violations, misconfigurations in billing and customer data compromises and loss scenarios.

In a regulatory environment that’s only getting stricter, the ‘do nothing’ approach is more of a gamble than ever before.

Yes, change is hard, but putting it off is worse

We get it. Change can feel risky, tumultuous and incredibly hard, but in today’s telecom landscape, the greater risk is doing nothing. The ISPs that will thrive aren’t necessarily the biggest, but those that are agile, moving quickly, automating confidently, and serving customers brilliantly. The good news? Modernisation is more accessible than ever — especially with unified platforms like Catena, designed specifically for smaller ISPs.

In the next chapter of this series, we’ll show what’s possible when you take the digital transformation leap, and how a unified platform can put you back in control.

[1] Conviva’s 2025 State of Digital Experience Report