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Telecommunications companies like Telekom want to involve US corporations in network expansion
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Oliver Berg / dpa
The European telecommunications companies want large US tech companies to share in the costs of network expansion in Europe.
"A large and growing part of network traffic is generated and monetized by large US platforms, but that requires continuous, intensive network investments and planning by the telecommunications sector," said a joint statement by 13 European companies.
In addition to Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone, the signatories also include Telefonica, Orange, KPN, BT Group, Telekom Austria, Vivacom, Proximus, Telenor, Altice Portugal, Telia Company and Swisscom.
The telecommunications industry is facing massive investments in 5G, fiber optic and cable networks in order to cope with the data and cloud services of Netflix, Google's YouTube and Facebook, among other things.
And these investments could only be sustainable if large tech companies made a "fair contribution" to network costs, the statement said.
Investments in the European telecommunications sector rose last year to a six-year high of 52.5 billion euros.
From 2022, Telekom alone plans to raise six billion euros a year for the expansion in Germany.
In order to be able to cope with these expenses, the Dax group is teaming up with investors, as in a joint venture with the infrastructure investor IFM from Australia, in order to build gigabit-capable connections in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Network load increases during the pandemic
The names of tech companies were not mentioned in the letter, but the corona crisis saw the demand for streaming services such as Netflix and Disney +, YouTube and Spotify rise rapidly.
Even in non-pandemic times, streaming films made up a large part of data traffic; in the corona crisis, in addition to mobile work equipment in the home office, streaming and online games also experienced enormous demand.
This also increased the load on the digital infrastructure.
Last year, the managing director of the Association for Telecommunications and Value-Added Services (VATM), Jürgen Grützner, said that due to the new technical challenges, the demand from companies for better infrastructure and connections had increased significantly.
hba / Reuters