Mobile Network Resilience Policy Principles

The GSMA has developed the following policy principles to guide governments and regulators in designing resilience frameworks that help enable operators to make investment decisions that support innovation in infrastructure and technologies, strengthen mobile network resilience, and enhance public trust in digital services.

For operators, this means governments and regulators should design and implement proportionate, risk- and outcome-based frameworks that encourage collaboration and dialogue across the wider ecosystem.

Resilience refers to the capability and capacity of a network to maintain and/or recover its ability to deliver mobile services to users in the face of disruptive scenarios. This involves redundancy, diversity, robustness, recovery processes, and the ability to enhance and adapt infrastructure, people, and processes so that essential services continue to function – or are restored quickly – when disrupted.

It also means learning from incidents and adapting to improve future performance. It depends on continually strengthening robust network designs and operational readiness, upskilling staff, further securing supply chains, backup power, diverse connectivity routes, rapid restoration processes and more effective coordination with government and other critical sectors.

The GSMA’s resilience policy principles take all these aspects into account when offering guidance to governments and regulators. The principles are:

Principle A: Avoid prescriptive regulation and promote outcome-based policy that supports sustained investment.

Principle B: Build upon resilience-by-design.

Principle C: Consult early and design with operational reality.

Principle D: Develop resilience policy as a cross-sector responsibility.

Principle E: Enhance trust through clarity, transparency, and continuity.