Across Europe, telecom prices are falling, and few countries illustrate this better than Italy. According to the 2025 survey from the regulator, AGCOM, telecom services are now 30% cheaper than a decade ago.
France follows closely, with a reduction of more than 26% in the same period. Even across the broader EU27 bloc, the average fall stands at almost 10%.
For consumers, this is excellent news. Broadband connectivity is arguably as vital as electricity or water in modern life, yet it has become more affordable and more inclusive in the decades where its importance has grown the most.
CEO of MEF (Mobile Ecosystem Forum).
Families spend less to stay connected, students face fewer barriers to digital learning, and high-quality entertainment is now accessible at prices unthinkable ten years ago.
Yet underneath this consumer success story lies a deep challenge for the sector itself. Prices are shrinking at a time when the need for investment has never been greater.
If the value of telecom services has effectively halved in real terms, what incentive or capacity remains for operators to fund 5G, fiber expansions, and the infrastructure of the future?
A utility unlike others
The paradox comes into sharper focus when telecommunications is compared with other essential utilities. In Italy, gas prices climbed by 76% in the past four years; power rose by 64.5%; even water and waste services posted increases. By contrast, the cost of a large basket of communications services fell by almost 11%.
Telecom sits in an unusual position: while every other strategic service has followed an upward inflationary path, communications has charted the opposite course. The sector has made itself the exception, and while this has delighted consumers, it has also trapped operators in a deflationary cycle.
Capex and revenues: diverging paths
This deflation comes despite an extraordinary decade of investment. From 2015 to 2022, global telco capital expenditure remained above $300 billion per year, with peaks driven by the largest 5G rollout in history and massive fiber expansion. By 2022, annual global spend reached more than $329 billion.
And yet revenues failed to keep pace. Global telecom service revenues stood at $1.14 trillion in 2023 and are forecast to grow only to $1.3 trillion by 2028.
At under 3% compound growth, a rate below the expected inflation, the industry in real terms is shrinking. In other words, the networks are growing stronger while the financial foundation beneath them is growing weaker.
Regional differences complicate the picture: China, for instance, invested $58.3 billion in telecom capex in 2022 alone, up 12%, even as many Western markets pulled back.
Leaner workforces, outsourced expertise
What many telecoms companies have been busy doing is to become more efficient and increase profitability. And that is not a bad thing. A review of automation, simplification and financial structures was needed. This tightening has consequences for people too.
Cost-cutting and outsourcing have profoundly reshaped the sector’s workforce. Overall telecom employment has reduced dramatically over the past decade, moving from a period of expansion to sustained contraction.
The combined workforce of the top 20 global operators fell from 1.8 million employees in 2015 to 1.3 million in 2024. Can the telecoms sector ride lower prices by becoming a leaner machine? The answer seems to be yes, but up to a point.
Thousands of jobs, once central to national operators, are now absorbed into shared-service models, tower companies, or managed service providers owned by external companies. You could say that this was just a shift of headcount; however, it is also a change of the type of talents that telecoms has decided to retain.
Managed services have further accelerated the changes, with operators outsourcing operations, IT management, and customer service to vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, and Accenture. While this model lowers costs and provides access to specialized expertise, it has also eroded institutional knowledge and internal career pathways.
The decline has intensified recently with the promise of AI to simplify workflows: an estimated 52,000 jobs have been ‘lost’ to AI in just the past year. British Telecom (BT) alone has announced plans to cut 10,000 positions over seven years, much of it stemming from AI and automation initiatives.
The drivers of job efficiency are multifaceted. Automation, digital self-service, and AI tools such as chatbots and self-healing networks are reducing headcounts in customer support and field operations.
For efficiency, such reforms make sense. Automation and outsourcing can reduce costs when margins are thin. But there is an unintended risk: the hollowing out of core expertise from telecom operators themselves.
Where once engineering depth was a defining asset of a national operator, today it is increasingly transferred to external vendors or specialists. Short-term savings may carry long-term consequences for resilience and innovation.
Searching for balance, not lists
The paths forward are many, but none are simple checklists. Instead, they represent overlapping directions of travel.
Operators will need gradually to shift competition away from pure price. For some, this might mean deeper bundling of services—whether media, internet security, or cloud—designed to anchor customers through value rather than subsidy.
Potentially the new source of growth will be enterprise services, and less with the consumer offering. For others, sharing infrastructure will remain essential: tower companies, joint fiber ventures, and roaming networks demonstrate the efficiencies that scale can bring.
Policymakers also have a part to play. If telecoms is to be treated as critical infrastructure, regulation must reflect that reality: policies that encourage long-term investment rather than reinforce price wars could determine whether Europe, for example, accelerates or lags.
And finally, there is a cultural shift to consider. In a sector often cast as commodity, customer experience and trust may yet prove the most defensible form of value. Reliability, simplicity, and clarity can do more to sustain loyal customers than another euro trimmed from the monthly bill.
The affordability of connectivity over the past decade has been both a triumph for consumers and a test for operators. It has made Europe more connected, more inclusive, and more competitive in digital adoption. But the paradox remains: each drop in price brings the sector closer to structural unsustainability.
The task now is not to reverse that affordability, but to find a balance: a balance between consumer gains and industry health, between efficiency and resilience, between the short-term delight of cheaper plans and the long-term need for robust, future-ready networks.
Telecoms cannot remain the lone deflationary utility forever. Whether through smarter collaboration, regulatory foresight, or innovation in services, sustainability must become the sector’s guiding principle. Only then can cheaper today also mean better tomorrow.
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