2023-11-10 07:11:43
The State Secretary Florian Tursky (ÖVP), who is responsible for digitization, wants to provide even more funding to promote broadband expansion – but the Internet providers refuse: They cannot spend the money so quickly because there are not enough planners, fitters and equipment and the strong funding leads to an explosion in construction costs. Tursky doubts the providers’ motives and remains undeterred: “We will continue to accelerate the expansion of broadband.”
Tursky announced in an interview with the APA and the “Tiroler Tageszeitung” that a new funding call would be announced in November. The exact volume has not yet been determined, “it will definitely be several hundred million euros. A total of 420 million euros is available in the budget for 2024. “That is 171 million more than originally thought because we are in the first distribution of the We have already taken more money into the second broadband billion and because we are now planning another call for November.” A total of 1.25 billion euros are now earmarked for the second broadband billion in the financial framework by 2027.
The industry association “Internet Offensive Austria” doesn’t want this money at all. At the beginning of the year, 900 million euros had already been allocated for fiber optic expansion – but only 10 percent of this had been used and 90 percent of the projects would not be completed until 2027. The next subsidies would go to a market that no longer has any construction capacity – the competition for personnel and machines will drive up construction costs. At the beginning of October, the industry had already proposed an end to broadband expansion funding. Instead, expensive bureaucracy should be reduced. The criticism is that people are waiting up to 18 months for simple building permits for urgent expansion work. It would also be better to stimulate demand so that the available connections are used, as the costs of actually connecting the cable to the house are very high.
Tursky rejects the criticism. “That’s something you can say very quickly if you have the appropriate market power.” In fact, there is enormous demand for fiber optic connections. “We have now finally achieved a speed of expansion in Austria that, unfortunately, was not there before.” Currently, around 6 billion euros are being invested privately in broadband expansion. Tursky doesn’t see that there is an overheated civil engineering market. “I currently perceive that the opposite is the case.” It can be heard from all federal states “that the construction industry, which is currently under great pressure, is managing to shift capacity from building construction to civil engineering.” That’s why we won’t let up, but will “continue to accelerate on broadband expansion.” This can also be seen as economic support for the construction industry. He sees the industry’s contradiction “more as an attempt by providers to further expand their current market power.” Traditionally, the providers have also benefited from the funding tenders, but above all municipalities, which then became owners of the infrastructure, as well as local cable network operators.
Funding will only be given “where there is a market failure, i.e. where no one is expanding privately because it doesn’t pay off,” emphasized the State Secretary. In Vienna, Salzburg and Tyrol, the supply of gigabit-capable stationary Internet connections up to the property boundary is already very high, and in the large federal states such as Lower Austria or Styria it is even lower. It’s not always fiber optics, but “the future has to be fiber to the home.”
This does not mean that these households actually use broadband internet – for many, the contracts are too expensive or the connection from the property line to the house is too expensive. “It is of course relevant for us to first make it theoretically available and, in a second step, to increase the take-up rate.” Austria is bad “because we have such good mobile internet.” 38 percent of Austrian households would still use mobile solutions for Internet at home.
Research and education in the area of digitalization are to be funded with over 100 million euros. The money goes towards broadband connections for schools and WLAN in the classrooms as well as devices, among other things.
As already reported, billions in funding will also flow as part of the “Chips Act”. The EU wants to double Europe’s global market share in semiconductor production from 10 to 20 percent by 2030. “This means a quadrupling of chip production in Europe,” explained Tursky. Thanks to the big players Infineon in Villach and AT&S in Leoben, Austria is already the fourth largest chip country in Europe in absolute numbers. The Chips Act is an EU funding instrument that allows nation states to support the development of semiconductor production in Europe with a total of 40 billion euros. Austria will use 3 billion euros of this in order to achieve investments of 7 billion euros by 2030. “This is not EU money, this is just permission to promote,” Tursky made clear. Of the 3 billion, the budget initially earmarks 160 million euros for 2024, and half a billion by 2027.
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