Lisbon, July 7, 2025 (Lusa) - The director-general of Connect Europe said, in an interview with Lusa, that this is “definitely a decisive moment” for telecommunications and hopes that by the end of the year, there will be a shift towards “a growth mindset”.

Alessandro Gropelli, who heads the association representing Europe’s leading communications operators, considered it to be “definitely a decisive moment because, on the one hand, there is geopolitical pressure, but on the other, technology is also changing”.

He was one of the speakers at the 34th APDC congress in Lisbon, where participants discussed the future of media and communications.

“Networks today are moving toward virtualisation and transformation into the cloud,” he said. “During this transition, we must stay highly aware that we want Europe to maintain its leading position, and proactive measures will ensure it does so over the next 10 years.”

In the 2000s, “we handed the Internet to the consumer”; in 2010, “we handed the smartphone revolution over”; and in the 2020s, “we can secure connectivity—what we currently control—by investing enough,” he notes.

That said, “I also want to say one thing: we need to insist, as companies, on good transatlantic relations and good relations with the US, because supply chains are global, will remain global, and Europe and the US have a special relationship,” Gropelli said.

“Many of the companies that help us build networks and provide communication services are from the US,” he added.

Therefore, “we need to do our utmost to maintain good relations, and political changes always occur, but as companies, we are here to stay, to invest and to continue to believe in this relationship, and Portugal is very well positioned because we are looking across the Atlantic,” he stressed.

When asked what he would like to see happen by the end of the year, the Connect Europe director general said hw would choose a shift to a “growth mindset.”

“I would like to see us move towards a growth mindset. I have been in the telecommunications sector for over 15 years and have been talking a lot with the regulator and the competition authorities” about the sector’s legacy.

“We should focus on the future. We should focus on growth. We should consider 2030, 2040, and look beyond last year, this year or next year,” he insisted.

In addition, he pointed to the need for scale in the sector: “We have many telecommunications operators that are very small, and this has an effect.”

Telecommunications operators are “obviously active in the services markets and, for example, in voice and messaging, they already compete with large technology companies, as there are many alternatives for messaging or even for calls, which are web-based.”

But we also “compete in areas such as the cloud, we compete in services such as cybersecurity,” he continues.

Now, “imagine that you are a small company in a fragmented European market of 27, where there are four or even five telecommunications operators in each one, and then you compete with a giant with a market capitalisation of a trillion dollars,” he said, highlighting Europe’s role in this framework.

“We should aim for an even larger scale. Sometimes we think that scale in the telecommunications sector is just about providing communication services to connect a home,” but “it’s also about our ability to compete in global digital markets, because telecommunications operators are the main technology companies we have in Europe today,” he told Lusa.

Gropelli believes that people often hope telecommunications operators will remain independent so that prices stay low and competition stays strong.

In his view, “sometimes three strong players with good investment capacity that can compete with each other is better for the market than five where each one is weak.”

“In my opinion, the public interest is best served by a strong telecommunications operator, because what it does is very critical,” he stressed, arguing that companies in the sector need to be strong to invest and innovate.

For example, the power blackout that recently hit the Iberian Peninsula demonstrated this need, he says.

“A lot of resilience is needed because our telecommunications operators need to invest” so that in future power outages they can have a backup power supply.

This means “a lot of investment” and in Portugal “we know that some operators have performed better than others because they have invested more in recent years in the resilience of their network,” he said.

A second point is that “in life, price is not the only factor” because citizens are more than consumers.

Citizens “are interested in affordable prices, good jobs, a secure connection, and perhaps in using a cloud that is based here in Europe, where their information remains accessible in the cloud,” he points out.

"If a president wakes up one morning and decides to shut down [access to the cloud], we will lose it," so "we need, as Europeans, to be able to collaborate with everyone in the world, because collaboration is good, but also to have our own services and scale, which is also important."

ALU/ADB // ADB.

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