Written by Andrew Wooden
Some of Europe’s biggest telcos have signed a letter pushing for big tech firms to contribute to the costs of running telecoms networks, again.
BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone, and many others (20 operators in total) have signed the open letter, which warned that ‘the European “Digital Decade” will fail’ unless future investments and regulatory change are brought in.
The letter points to EU estimates that at least €174 billion of new investment will be needed by 2030 to deliver on its various connectivity targets, but that the telecoms sector is currently not strong enough to meet that demand and many operators are ‘barely earning their cost of capital.’
It also says that data traffic has grown ‘relentlessly’ at an average rate of 20-30% each year, primarily driven by just a handful of large tech companies – by which it means big streaming, social media and cloud firms like Netflix, Facebook and Google.
‘Big tech companies pay today almost nothing for data transport in our networks,’ claims the letter, and as well as asserting these firms should pay towards it, it also calls for regulatory change ‘accepting the need for scale’, which would appear to mean make operator mergers easier.
