More than half of the data traffic in Germany takes place on websites of five companies. For years, mobile communications companies have been demanding that Internet giants such as Google, Netflix and Meta share the costs – and they’re getting a hearing in the political arena.
Mobile providers are calling more forcefully for large online services to pay for the use of their networks. Every day, 55 percent of data traffic is generated by just five companies, said the head of telecoms group Orange, Christel Heydemann. This costs European telecommunications companies around 15 billion euros a year, she said.
In recent years, 600 billion euros have been invested in networks in Europe alone, Heydemann said at the start of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But many mobile communications companies are finding it difficult to earn money with it. Consumers expect to pay less and less, and some of them are dealing with outdated regulatory measures. Regulators and policymakers have a key role to play in balancing this „unsustainable“ situation, Heydemann said.
Mobile network companies against Internet heavyweights
Network operators have been demanding for years that companies such as Google, Netflix and Facebook’s Meta should have to contribute to the cost of networks because they generate a lot of data traffic. The online heavyweights counter that it was their services that made the fast data networks attractive to consumers in the first place.
In the meantime, the mobile communications industry is being listened to more by politicians than in the past. Last week, the EU Commission launched a public consultation on, among other things, who should pay for the costs of network expansion. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said in Barcelona that a fair model must be found for financing the huge expansion costs. There is more at stake than a conflict between the interests of network operators and online services. The goal, he said, must be to prepare Europe for the next surge in networking and to better exploit the potential of the common EU market.
At the same time, mobile operators want to grow beyond their previous business as network operators. „It’s no longer a phone network. It’s a decentralized and distributed supercomputer,“ Telefónica CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete stated as a goal. To achieve this, the mobile communications groups wanted to create a common new standard – as they once did with the GSM networks that enabled the rapid spread of cell phones.