Is a public EV charge point closer to a gym membership or a mobile network?

The answer decides who ends up owning the EV driver.

A gym makes money from equipment that mostly sits unused. Members pay a flat fee, most use less than they pay for, and the recurring revenue covers the rent and the hardware whatever the footfall. A public charge point has the same profile - expensive kit idle most of the day - yet it is sold almost entirely per kilowatt hour. It is tempting to conclude charging just needs a membership model. Tempting, and wrong in one important place.

The idle asset problem.

Time-based utilisation of UK ultra-rapid chargers averaged 12.8% in Q4 2025, according to Zapmap and the Green Finance Institute. A rough model shows the consequence. An ultra-rapid charger costs around £100k installed; recovered over ten years with maintenance and software, that is roughly £15k a year of fixed cost. At current throughput it adds about 30 p/kWh on top of electricity costing 20 to 25 p/kWh, with fixed network, financing, site costs, operations and margin pushing the retail price towards 80 p/kWh. Volumetric pricing makes the busy hours pay for the quiet ones, which is why public charging costs what it does. The obvious fix looks like a flat membership fee: recover the fixed costs up front and let each kilowatt hour cost almost nothing.

Where the gym comparison breaks.

Gym economics work because of who joins: gyms profit from members who pay and stay away. A charging subscription attracts the opposite crowd - the taxi drivers and high-mileage commuters whose usage costs more than the fee. The breakage that makes a gym profitable runs in reverse for a charge point operator. Bonnet sold fixed-rate, multi-network charging bundles through an app, later reworked its pricing from bundles to discounts, and was acquired by OVO in 2023. A standalone subscription with no second margin to lean on is exposed when wholesale charging costs rise.

Why mobile networks may hold the answer.

Mobile telecoms has the same physics: a high fixed-cost network, mostly idle, sold through monthly bundles. It survives heavy users through fair-use policies and network control. It also invented the structure charging is now reproducing - the Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), a brand that owns no infrastructure but buys wholesale capacity and owns the customer.

Energy suppliers are becoming the MVNOs of charging. — A brand that buys wholesale capacity and owns the customer

OVO launched the UK's first combined home and public charging subscription in November 2025, bundling home smart charging with public charging credit for £37.50 a month. Octopus already runs the home half: its £40-a-month unlimited home smart charging is oversubscribed and closed to new customers. This month it extended the model into public, launching the Drive Pack in France with Powerdot - €49.99 a month for unlimited home and public charging, billed as a world first.

A supplier can carry what an app could not, because it earns margin on home charging, owns the billing relationship, and uses smart-charging control to shift demand into cheap hours. Those are the telecoms tools - fair use and network management - applied to charging.

Coverage becomes the strategic asset.

An MVNO is only as good as its roaming footprint - and the same is true here. A bundle covering one network is a curiosity; one covering most of the places a driver actually stops is a product. That makes the supplier with the most Charge Point Operator (CPO) relationships the structural winner, which is why Octopus can go furthest: its Electroverse platform holds roaming agreements with more than 900 charging networks across Europe. The Drive Pack is what happens when a roaming contract book becomes a tariff. The advantage compounds where the supplier also sells the CPO its electricity: on both sides of the meter, it can price the bundle on netted margins no standalone app or operator can reach.

The strategic asset is not the charger. It is the contract book.

Utilisation decides who sits on which side.

Powerdot runs destination chargers at supermarkets and shopping centres, with hours to spare, so selling idle capacity into a supplier's bundle is rational. Fastned, with busy motorway sites, is going the other way - deepening its own subscription to 30% off for €5.99 a month and keeping the driver. The market is sorting itself the way telecoms did: strong networks stay retail, weak ones go wholesale.

Which leaves every operator with a question the telecoms industry answered twenty years ago. You can own the network or you can own the customer. Only the strongest get to do both. Utilisation decides which side of that line each operator ends up on.

A caveat on the non-energy numbers: I do not work for a CPO. This is an outside-in view, and I welcome feedback.