The CTOs of Fastweb, Wind and Vodafone opened the doors of the first fibre optic central office in Rome. The project is a shared access, high-performing fiber optic network rolled out in a test area in Rome.
The central office connects 7400 households and SMEs in 525 buildings in an area of Rome. The project regards the development of a single point-to-point "Fiber-to-the-Home" network delivering broadband services directly to end users, both households and companies, guaranteeing competition between providers.
The area was previously only reached by Telecom Italia's copper network. The project was launched jointly by the three providers, with 26 kilometres of track and 180 kilometres of fibre.
From July the customers of the three providers will be migrated to the new network and will be able to navigate at 100 Mbps for the first time in Italy. Business customers will be guaranteed an ultrafast bandwidth of up to 1 giga. The wiring of the buildings will ensure minimum inconvenience to customers and will entail no additional cost.
The project is part of a plan that entails coverage of the 15 main Italian cities (10 million people), within 5 years, with an investment of around 2.5 billion euro shared between all operators and the institutions involved. In a second phase, the plan may be extended to cover cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, reaching 50% of the Italian population with a total investment of EUR 8.5 billion.