Italian service providers iron out open access fiber network agreement

A group of unnamed Italian service providers have finalized the technical details on a proposed open access Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network.

Paolo Romani, Italy's Deputy Minister for Communications said in a Dow Jones article that the service providers jointly developed a technical model to transition the country's copper-based last mile broadband network to fiber. A public forum will be held to discuss the current state of Italy's fiber network infrastructure and how much money it would take to expand it.

While Italy lags the rest of Europe in terms of broadband availability, enhancing broadband access in the country has been anything but easy. At issue are separate plans by the country's incumbent carrier Telecom Italia and a group of competitive providers that want to build an open access network that would also include Telecom Italia.  

Telecom Italia SpA has refused to let competitors such as FastWeb, Vodafone and Wind--which have developed their own open access network proposal--and plans to proceed with its own broadband network plan that would bring 100 megabits per second broadband to 50 percent of the Italian population by 2018.

Arguing that Italy's Next Generation Network committee favored Telecom Italia's proposal over their own proposal, the FastWeb, Vodafone and Wind trio decided to withdraw their open access network proposal from the NGN committee. BT Italia, the Italian arm of BT, also decided to opt out of the NGN.

For more:
- Wall Street Journal via Dow Jones has this article

Related articles:
FastWeb, Wind and Vodafone Italy abandon open access fiber alliance
Fastweb, Vodafone, Wind to build open access network
Regulator encourages Telecom Italia to help with open access fiber network
Telecom Italia says 'absolute no' to shared fiber network
Fastweb, Vodafone, Wind to build open access network