The effects of high bills on 5G in Italy. What Labriola (Tim) said

Without an intervention on energy prices, next year companies in the sector will be forced to choose: invest in the fifth generation network or pay their bills. The manager’s warning

Without an intervention on energy prices, telecom companies will have to decide next year whether to invest in the 5G network or pay their energy bills. The warning came from Pietro Labriola, CEO of Tim, who spoke to the audience of Confindustria’s Young Entrepreneurs in Capri. In Italy “we paid for 5G frequencies eight times compared to France”, he explained again. In the title of the conference dedicated to the telco market “we must add two clear words: courage and optimism, because without courage we cannot change things, and we must change things, and without optimism everything is more complex”, he stressed.

The telecommunications sector needs an industrial policy to be decided, “in Italy and in Europe,” said Labriola. “There is a specific situation of telecommunications in Europe. The industrial policy choices made, unlike the US, South America and Asian countries, were to maximize the price reduction for consumers and to transfer value from incumbentthe former public concessionaires, to other operators: 30 years later there are no operators in Europe who manage to have an adequate level of profitability ”, stated Labriola, explaining that in the US there are three operators, in Europe 120.

Among the points of attention raised by the CEO of Tim, the strong investments necessary for the construction of the new generation networks “in a context in which, compared to the public utilities which have a defined return on capital model, telecommunications do not ”. “The specificity of telecommunications is that we are the only infrastructure sector in which competition on infrastructure has been liberalized: when you go to see the public utilities, that’s not the case, ”added Labriola. It would be useful for the sector to arrive at a new pricing model. “Holland is the first country in which the regulator has defined the prices at which fiber is sold at the level wholesale in the next 8 years: when I have an investment that has a return of 10-15 years I cannot have the price definition for two years ”, he stressed again. “We are also discussing this set of factors with the other operators at a community level. We have to decide what is the industrial policy for telecommunications in Europe and in Italy ”, concluded Labriola.

Without an intervention on energy prices, telecom companies will have to decide next year whether to invest in the 5G network or pay their energy bills, Labriola warned. in Italy “we paid for 5G frequencies eight times compared to France,” she added.