With an average increase estimated at 21% per year by 2030, internet traffic is experiencing exponential growth in France. This is the result of a recent study by the French Telecoms Federation, which also highlights massive investments in infrastructure, of the order of 114 billion euros over the last ten years, including 10% on infrastructure alone. year 2022. Added to this are high taxes and inflation, particularly on energy, which increase maintenance costs, despite prices remaining relatively low for consumers compared to other European countries.
Major global firms in the viewfinder
Among the good resolutions for 2024, Nicolas Guérin, president of the FFT bringing together different Internet access providers such as Altice-SFR, Bouygues Telecom or even Orange (Iliad-Free having chosen not to be a member), calls for a more equitable contribution from the Internet giants, responsible for a significant part of data traffic, in order to correct what he considers to be “a notorious financial imbalance“. According to him, the big companies such as Google, Netflix, Alibaba and Microsoft would be “thirty times less taxed in France than operators“, while they force the latter to “constantly readjust networks to avoid saturation“.
The average consumption of mobile data in France would thus have increased from 11 GB per month in 2021 to 14.3 GB per month in 2022, and could exceed 1000 GB of total monthly consumption (fixed and mobile) by 2030, compared to around 200 GB currently. If the various periods of confinement have disrupted our habits, it is especially streaming, which by definition consumes bandwidth, as well as generalized dematerialization and the use of the cloud which are being singled out. Their impact would be economic, energy and environmental.
The French government requested
If expecting significant investments from the main Internet majors seems illusory, Nicolas Guérin would like government intervention aimed at regulating the traffic of these different platforms. The very ones who had nevertheless reduced their flow rates during the multiple confinements in order to allow teleworking, before resuming their usual consumption.
Players like Netflix or Spotify currently have no such constraints, but are nevertheless required to financially support French creation. SVOD platforms must devote a quarter of their turnover in France to financing the production of audiovisual and cinematographic works in the territory. As for online music listening platforms, a tax will be applied to their turnover from this year. The result is increased subscriptions for almost all entertainment services in recent months.
Getting major global firms to participate in the development of Internet networks will therefore not be an easy task and, whether they accept or not, should lead in one way or another to an increase in prices for the consumer.