“Today telecoms operators are simply burning money”
Anacom wants to renew the spectrum licences of Meo, Nos and Vodafone for periods of 14 and 15 years, and the public consultation is open until 9 October. For Alessandro Gropelli, director-general of Connect Europe, the proposal “does not match the most recent thinking at European level”, which points to “unlimited licences” or, in exceptional cases, at least 40 years.
Connect Europe represents Europe’s largest telecoms operators, Meo among them, and is the industry’s voice in Brussels. Confronted with the fact that the German regulator extended licences by only five years and the Italian one proposed eight, Gropelli does not accept the comparison: the benchmark, he argues, should be China and the United States, and by that benchmark “Europe and Portugal are seriously out of step”.
The interview, proposed by Meo, does not stop at spectrum. Asked whether consumers should expect to pay more for better networks, the director-general of Connect Europe says no — what he expects is for the number of operators within each market to fall. And he points to the Portuguese case: “Portugal and Belgium went in the opposite direction. They had three and added a fourth.”
AI translation from the Portuguese. First published in ECO on 14 September 2026.