According to the CNMC annual report, Spain completed the shutdown of its copper network in 2025. It has been reported as a modernisation milestone, and it is. It is also the end of a process that took more than ten years and a great deal more money than anyone budgeted at the outset.

Switching a technology on is a project. Switching it off is a negotiation with everything that was built on top of it while it worked.

The invoice you do not see

When you decide to keep an old system going «one more year», the cost you write down is maintenance. It is not. The real cost sits in three places and none of them appears under that heading:

  • Everything new has to be compatible. Every product you launch while the old system is alive carries its limitations. And that weight does not disappear when you switch it off: it stays in the design.
  • The people who know how to maintain it become scarce and expensive. And meanwhile they are not building anything.
  • The customers left are the hardest to move. The ones who could migrate migrated on their own years ago.

Why it always drags on

Because the decision to switch off is made by whoever pays for maintenance, while the benefit goes to whoever builds what comes next. If those are separate areas with separate budgets, the conversation never happens.

That is why we keep an uncomfortable rule in the group: every technology engine is born with a review date written down. Not an expiry date, a review date. When it arrives, somebody has to defend why it is still alive. Silence does not count as a defence.

How the decision is really made

The useful question is not «does this still work?». It almost always works. The question is: «if we did not have it today, would we build it?».

If the answer is no and you keep it anyway, say out loud what that money is buying. Sometimes the answer is legitimate: time, calm, a contract that expires in eighteen months. Other times the answer is that nobody wants to be the one who switches it off.

The figure that frames the debate

Sector investment in 2025 was €6.073 billion and, excluding spectrum, fell 9.8% year on year. At the same time, employment reached 63,000 people, the highest figure of the past decade.

Less infrastructure investment and more people. That is what happens when an industry finishes building and starts operating: spending shifts from concrete to people and systems. Anyone who does not make that shift in time will be left with an excellent network and nobody who knows how to get value from it.

What we apply

No proprietary technology without a written answer to two questions: what happens the day we want to switch it off, and who will know how. Without an answer, it is not an asset. It is an open-ended commitment dressed as one.

Copper took a decade to go dark because nobody was in a hurry to absorb the cost of the decision. It is worth looking at what we are keeping alive today for the same reason.