The ACG Research study highlights how application-driven traffic is reshaping the economics of fixed and mobile networks. While fixed networks benefit from lower unit costs ($0.06/GB vs. $0.33/GB for mobile), far higher household data consumption drives a 393% higher TCO per subscriber ($21.22 vs. $5.40). A small set of applications accounts for the vast majority of costs: 9 apps drive 92% of fixed expenses and seven drive 96% of mobile led by YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, Facebook, and Steam. Cost burdens are concentrated in the access layer for fixed networks (75% of TCO) and in the RAN for mobile (85%), underscoring structural vulnerabilities as video, gaming, and latency-sensitive applications proliferate.

For CSPs, these dynamics create rising margin pressure, which are exacerbated by OTT players that capture revenue while operators absorb infrastructure costs. To respond, CSPs must adopt application-aware traffic management to optimize QoE and defer CapEx, pursue commercial or regulatory frameworks to rebalance costs with OTT providers, and deploy CSP specific TCO models to guide investment and policy strategies. Sustaining profitability in an application-centric era will depend on combining smarter traffic engineering, fairer cost sharing, and tailored economic modeling.

 For more information, contact Ray Mota or Peter Fetterolf.