View: LTGs should pay a Broadband Infra Levy proportional to their internet traffic
About 65% of all traffic is attributed to video sites, up from 51% in 2016. Every day, people watch around 1 billion hours of video on YouTube. Netflix is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic.
Amazon Prime Video has more than 200 million subscribers worldwide. These large traffic generators (LTGs) provide their OTT video services across the internet. Video OTT services became a boon for telcos as they recovered from a stiff price war and value erosion in 2016.
As quality and quantity of content improved, data consumption grew exponentially. But it is increasingly becoming a double-edged sword for telcos. Traffic generated from video services, especially on mobile networks, leads to massive network congestion that affects quality of service on the public network.
Telcos need to invest in infrastructure and upgrade continuously to match quality standards. So, who will pay for the increased investment demands? Europe’s Digital Decade programme has committed to developing adequate frameworks that enable all market actors benefiting from digital transformation to make a fair and proportionate contribution to investment in the public goods of telecom infrastructure. Recently, the ‘fair share’ resolution was included in a competition policy document by European Parliament members.
They voted in favour of a ‘policy framework’ that would call on big tech companies to contribute to telco capex budgets. But OTT firms argue they also invest in submarine cables connecting continents and content delivery networks (CDNs) that provide caching and nearby delivery of content. Google is the largest owner and investor in submarine cable networks globally, with investment of more than $40 billion in more than 14 global subsea
. Read more on economictimes.indiatimes.com
