Arcep 2026 state of the internet in France: what the new figures change for users

Every year, Arcep — the French telecoms regulator — publishes its "state of the internet in France" report, the third volume of its annual activity report. It is the most complete snapshot of how the French network actually works: where the traffic comes from, where it goes, who carries it, and at what cost to the planet. The 2026 edition, released on 17 July 2026 and covering the end of 2025, confirms several long-running trends — and reveals a new, massive one: the environmental impact of generative AI. A breakdown of what to take away, and what it concretely changes for the average user and for visitors of Texto SMS Gratuit.

Photo: Unsplash — the internet is, first and foremost, buildings, racks and a great deal of electricity.

56 Tbit/s of incoming traffic: +10.4% in one year

The first figure to remember: incoming data traffic in France (what households and businesses pull from abroad or from internet exchange points) reached 56 Tbit/s at the end of 2025, up +10.4% year-on-year. Outgoing traffic (what France sends to the rest of the world) grew even faster: +28.1%, to 6.6 Tbit/s.

This imbalance is structural: we still consume much more than we emit, due to the weight of foreign platforms. But the rise in outgoing traffic — faster than the rise in incoming traffic — reflects a new fact: French and European platforms are now pulling more traffic outward, a sign that the ecosystem is producing more (video, podcasts, e-commerce, cloud backups).

Five players capture 49% of the traffic: concentration continues

The most discussed finding of the report concerns the concentration of destination traffic. On their own, Netflix, Akamai, Google, Amazon and Meta capture 49% of the total data volume exchanged in France. That is one packet out of two flowing through the infrastructure or the services of these five companies.

This concentration, already flagged in previous editions, remains a concern for the regulator, and for European digital sovereignty. It also means that a technical decision by any one of these players — for example, a wider deployment of a more efficient video codec, or the setup of a local cache — can move national consumption by several points without anyone in France having asked for it.

IPv6: 74.7% in France, first worldwide

Arcep confirms France's position as the world leader in the adoption of IPv6, with a rate of 74.7% on end-user connections. Behind this average figure:

• 94% of fixed-line consumer customers have IPv6 enabled on their box;
• 83% of consumer mobile customers are on IPv6;
• but only 38% of websites and 25% of email servers are actually reachable over IPv6.

We already covered this transition in a dedicated article (IPv6: France is the world champion); the 2026 report confirms that the transition is now complete on the network side, and that the next step is to bring content — i.e. websites and servers — onto the new protocol.

Data centres and AI: +12% electricity, +23% GHG

The most debated part of the report is undoubtedly the chapter on environmental impact. Arcep is quantifying for the first time the footprint of generative AI on French data centres: +12% in electricity consumption and +23% in greenhouse gas emissions, in a single year.

These figures are no surprise — the explosion in the use of ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini, Claude and their competitors since 2023 has considerably increased the load on GPUs. But they are now quantified, and that is a first. They are being published as the European Union finalises its AI Act, part of which concerns precisely the energy transparency of model providers.

What this changes for the user

Three concrete consequences for French users:

1. The network stays robust, but fragile on the content-provider side: if any one of the five players capturing 49% of traffic suffers an outage (we remember the 2023 AWS incident, or the 2024 Cloudflare outage), potentially half of French traffic is affected. The report calls for stronger resilience through diversity of paths and cache operators.
2. AI becomes a line item in its own right in the digital bill: for the players that internalise inference, the marginal cost of a query is dropping, but the overall cost is exploding. For individuals, this translates into rising subscriptions at publishers that delegate AI to third parties.
3. IPv6 changes the game for new services: the gradual end of NAT (sharing one IPv4 address across multiple devices) simplifies how connected objects, voice over IP and, to some extent, real-time messaging work — all areas that SMS bypasses, but which could complement it in the medium term.

And SMS in all this?

One might think all of this is far removed from our core business. Not quite. First because mobile internet and the cellular network that carries SMS share the same backbone infrastructure: when IP traffic grows, operators invest, and the quality of the SMS service benefits from it — even if SMS volume is structurally declining (see our article on the decline of SMS in France).

Then because data centres also host SMS-over-IP gateways, operator APIs and OTP (one-time password) services: a data-centre incident, and the whole SMS authentication ecosystem can be disrupted. In that respect, the Arcep 2026 report is a useful read for anyone interested in the resilience of notification channels.

Finally, the reminder that 49% of traffic passes through five foreign players is one more argument for European digital sovereignty — which is also a communication issue: being able to send a message to a contact without depending exclusively on a non-EU platform is precisely what SMS — and web SMS services like ours — still allow in 2026.

The key dates and figures to remember

Indicator	Value at end of 2025	Yearly change
Incoming traffic	56 Tbit/s	+10.4%
Outgoing traffic	6.6 Tbit/s	+28.1%
Market share of the top 5 CDNs	49%	rising
IPv6 adoption rate (users)	74.7%	1st worldwide
Data centre electricity consumption	(reference)	+12%
Data centre GHG emissions	(reference)	+23%

The full report (PDF, 200 pages) is available on the Arcep website. To dig further into sovereignty issues, you can revisit our articles on the end of copper and ADSL and on the concentration of the mobile market, or get in touch via our contact page.

In short: the French internet is growing, concentrating, and consuming more. The Arcep 2026 figures are a lucid snapshot of a network that remains high-performing, but whose resilience, sovereignty and environmental footprint deserve growing attention — including for the most everyday uses, such as sending an SMS from a browser.