Kroes wants telecoms to modernize Europe’s broadband infrastructure

Neelie Kroes wants telecommunications companies in Europe to invest in better technology in order to advance the broadband networks in the member nations–or else. I like the stand that the European digital agenda commissioner has taken and how she plans to address the leading operators in order to make them finally start taking steps to develop new broadband networks: with firmness, authority, and also with a hint of a threat.

Kroes has called on the leading telecom firms to begin shelling out money and start investing in next generation broadband infrastructure and networks or else she’ll be cutting how much these firms are raking in from their older networks. The commissioner will be calling on companies like Deutsche Telekom and France Télécom, which are just some of the firms that have been begging off from investing as they’ve been asking the government for incentives before doing so.

Kross asserted that she thinks the previously state-owned operators have already been able to generate huge profits when they were running on the older, copper-based networks. So why can’t these funds be used to fund new broadband network fibre instead?

According to Reuters, Kross said: “So I want to restore the incentive for fibre investment. It is critical that access charges reflect actual network costs.” She has not given any specific details but in a separate interview with Cable Europe, she did say that “will not be easy to mobilise” the investment needed.

It is one of the goals of the EU to provide basic broadband to all homes and Europeans (all 500 million of them) by the year 2013. And by 2020, the EU wants to upgrade all connections to one that’s transmitting at least 30 megabits per second of data and have at least half of all the households access bandwidths of 100 Mbps. In order to achieve these goals, the European Commission would need an invest of at least €300 billion, which is equivalent to £257 billion.

Kross added: “The very high costs present an obstacle to achieving the targets for super-fast broadband networks.” So in order to achieve the goal much faster, operators could actually be of help in achieving the 100 Mbps speed by urging them to lower their prices to challenge the current providers instead.

“Should cable companies with upgraded networks decide to engage in greater price leadership, adding stronger competitive pressure on traditional telecoms networks, we would obviously welcome that,” Kross concluded.

Source – The Guardian