VSow weighs an e-mail? A priori no more than a simple conversation over coffee in the morning. On closer inspection, to get it to its recipient, it takes a few million tons of steel and electronics if it goes through the mobile phone and hundreds of thousands of kilometers of optical fiber if it uses the underground routes of broadband networks. As the fascinating book by journalist Guillaume Pitron tells us, Digital Hell. Journey after a like (Les Liens qui liberante, 2021), the dematerialized society promised by digital technology begins with a lot of physical material… and pollution, the subject of his work. Digital will soon be the largest material infrastructure ever built by man.
It is therefore not surprising that, for telecom operators, infrastructure is the most strategic asset, and above all the juiciest. Witness, the great bazaar that is being set up at the moment to best value these nuggets. We learned this Sunday, March 13 that the board of directors of Telecom Italia authorized its new CEO, Pietro Labriola, to negotiate with the American fund KKR the merger of its fiber optic network with that of its competitor, Open Fiber. An operation supported by the Italian government, which intends to accelerate the deployment of broadband Internet in the Peninsula.
Steel worth gold
For the Italian operator, it is a matter of getting out of debt and facing up to competition. The case drags on, because its shareholder Vivendi would like to come out with the least possible damage from one of its most catastrophic investments of the last twenty years. He is therefore seeking to raise the stakes, well beyond the 10 billion euros offered by KKR.
At the same time, the leading European operator, Deutsche Telekom, intends to make the most of its network of towers for mobile telephony. According to the Reuters agency, the German has launched the auction to sell all or part of its 40,000 pylons, estimated at nearly 20 billion euros. A trifle that does not frighten financiers eager for good long-term investments.
In addition to KKR, another American, American Tower, does its market in Europe, while the Catalan company Cellnex Telecom has accumulated, in a few years, nearly 130,000 pylons in Europe, including those of the French SFR and the British Hutchison. For its part, the French Orange is considering a major operation by combining its 26,000 pylons in France and Spain with those of its British counterpart Vodafone or why not Deutsche Telekom. Because, today, all this steel is worth gold. The price of a short e-mail quickly sent.