worried about the future of European telecoms, the Commission hopes to reconcile two camps that have been tearing themselves off for years on the financing of networks.
by Olivier Pinaud (Barcelona, Special Envoy )
Four people are sitting on a small plastic plane. The device does not fly. It is placed in the middle of the South Korean operator stand SK Telecom. And yet, with their virtual reality glasses connected in 5G, the four occupants are like in the clouds. This year again, at the Mobile World Congress, the World Mobile Salon, which is held until March 2 in Barcelona, operators, equipment manufacturers and digital groups compete with demonstrations to make the telecoms of the future touch. But will they ever exist?
Listen to operators, times are serious. The explosion of data traffic generated by digital service groups, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and others, those called GAFA, forces them to invest always more in their networks, while, in The same time, they say, regulation and competition compress their profits. “The opposite winds for our industry in Europe may never have been so strong (…) because massive investments in networks – nearly 600 billion euros in Europe in the last decade! Difficult to monetize, “said Christel Heydemann, the director general of Orange, at the opening of the Barcelona show. Hence the will of the operators to make GAFA pay more strongly to the use of their networks, which the digital service groups do not want to hear about.
This battle is not new. But the debate has taken a new round in recent weeks under the leadership of Thierry Breton, the European commissioner in charge of the internal and digital market, also worried about the state of telecoms in Europe. “Today’s networks are simply not up to the massive transformation that takes place,” said the commissioner in Barcelona. This is why its services launched, on February 23, and until May 19, a public consultation which must allow, in addition to clarifying the debate, of sketching what the networks of tomorrow must be. “I do not know what the result of this consultation will be. The question is what we want to build together. After that, we will see what to invest, which must pay for what and if it is necessary to change the Regulation. I don’t have a taboo, “said Breton. 2> a first victory
The operators, who see in this consultation a first victory, defend themselves to target a new GAFA tax. “We are not asking for a new tax mechanism,” said M Me heydemann, but “a fair and direct contribution to the costs of the network”, like a toll. “This could be an incentive tariff mechanism: the more we save the bandwidth, the less we pay,” decrypts the manager of another French operator who also sees it as an environmental argument: this would encourage GAFA to contain their traffic and therefore reduced the energy consumption. The Arcep, the French telecoms gendarme, noted that at the end of 2021, 51 % of traffic to customers of the four main French operators came from five suppliers: Netflix, Google, Akamai (which carries the traffic of several customers, like Disney) , Facebook and Amazon. “Is it relevant to oversize our networks for some actors?” Asks this leader.
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