On the occasion of its 2024 wishes, the French Telecoms Federation expressed two wishes. She wants to see large American Chinese firms, such as Google, Alibaba, Netflix or Microsoft, participate more in the financing of French fixed and mobile networks. She also wants the impact of these same companies on the networks to be less significant. Pay more to consume less?
We know it well: managing a telecom network is not easy. Especially in a market like France. On the one hand, you have operators who invest tactically to make money. On the other hand, you have the government which wants to reduce the digital divide and dematerialize public services, while avoiding exploding the carbon footprint or reduce the tax burden. Not to mention French geography: certain regions are extremely difficult and expensive to cover.
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Fortunately, this does not prevent networks from deploying. 114 billion euros have been spent over the last 10 yearsamount revealed by Nicolas Guérin, president of the FFT (French Telecoms Federation, which represents Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom, but no longer Free since 2015) during the presentation of his 2024 wishes. More than 10% of this sum (14.6 billion euros) was spent in 2022, meaning that there is an acceleration. And that’s very good. But there is also inflation, particularly in energy. This means that the network costs more to maintain each year. And the price of subscriptions is one of the lowest in Europe.
French operators want web giants to finance French telecoms networks
Nicolas Guérin denounces in his speech a now insoluble equation into which he wishes to introduce a new variable: the Internet giants which, according to him, are the main beneficiaries of the deployment of very high speed to consumers, whether in France or in the world. In his speech, he calls on the government to put in place a contribution paid by these large companies which are Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft and without forgetting Alibaba.
According to Nicolas Guérin, these companies are “ thirty times less taxed in France than telecom operators ”, while they force the operators “ to constantly resize our networks to avoid saturation “. Work whose cost could have contributed to reducing the digital divide instead of bringing a little more speed to consumers of social networks and streaming in all its forms.
Web giants consume too much energy and bandwidth
The president of the FFT also points out the continued increase in traffic from its major web players, the impact of which is heavy at the energy, technical, economic and environmental levels. Nicolas Guérin therefore calls on the French government not to block, but to regulate the traffic of these content providers. Especially since these same providers had (after a certain incentive) themselves reduced their traffic during the 2020 confinement, in order to free up bandwidth for professional applications.
Obtaining more money from large global firms, while asking that it consume less bandwidth, here is an ambitious way of seeing the new balance of the economic equation of telecoms in France. Pay more to consume less. It is obviously not certain that the firms targeted by these requests see the situation in the same way.