According to Telecompaper, the Italian government has released a draft proposal regarding the country’s long-mooted ‘Fibre for Italy’ broadband project. In November 2010 seven major Italian telecoms operators agreed to join forces in order to form a new company charged with overseeing the fibre-optic rollout in areas where no operator has scheduled a fibre deployment. The companies involved are Telecom Italia, FastWeb, Wind, Vodafone Italia, Tiscali, BT Italia and 3 Italia. The new company is expected to have an executive committee chaired by Industry Minister Paolo Romani, which will focus on avoiding duplicate installations and coordinating investments.
If the government’s draft proposal is approved by all of the aforementioned participants, a publicly-owned company named ‘FiberCo’ will be formed by the members of the consortium. FiberCo will begin its first deployments in September 2011, with trial rollouts in six unnamed cities. The field tests are expected to be completed by April 2012. As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, the ‘Fibre for Italy’ project aims to bring fibre connectivity to 20 million people in Italy’s 15 largest cities by 2015, whilst fixed line incumbent Telecom Italia has also committed itself to bringing FTTH/FTTB connectivity to an additional 138 cities by 2018.