The CEOs of Vodafone Group, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Orange have issued an urgent plea for European regulators to force large content platforms to contribute to the cost of the digital infrastructure delivering their services.
An open letter signed by Telefonica chairman and CEO Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Hottges, Vodafone chief Nick Read and outgoing Orange chairman and CEO Stephane Richard, pointed to the ever-increasing demands on networks and stark differences in profitability of businesses delivering and creating services.
The quartet noted video streaming, gaming and social media content originating from a few digital platforms accounted for 70 per cent of network traffic, with the major players continually pushing higher-quality streams.
They added these companies were profiting from “hyperscaling business models at little cost while network operators shoulder the required investments in connectivity” at a time when their own retail markets were “in perpetual decline in terms of profitability”.
The letter echoes grievences operator executives have highlighted a number of times, with the inability to make a viable return on network investments cited as putting further infrastructure development and service quality at risk.
Pointing to a broad European Commission pledge made in January 2022 to ensure all market players contribute to the cost of public services and infrastructure, the chiefs “urgently call upon legislators to introduce rules at European Union level to make this principle a reality”.
“The clock is ticking loudly, particularly given the huge investments still required to achieve the connectivity targets for 2030 set by the European Commission…Without an equitable solution, we will not get there”.
Ghana
The investment of telcos in Ghana have created several Fintech firms and other mobile value-added service providers, all of whom run their services on the back of the infrastructure and the subscribers generated by the telcos.
As European telcos begin to push for content platforms to contribute to the investment into industry infrastructure, Ghana can take a cue from that and begin to consider how the Fintechs and VAS providers can make some contribution to the key industry infrastructure in the spirit of local content.
Such a policy will given a more realistic meaning to the local content drive, as several attempts to get locals into the mainstream telecom space seem to have flopped, largely because they are unable to do it on their own without partnerships.
