Rome, May 24, 2007 - An agreement between Rome City Council and FASTWEB for the supply of fixed telephone services was presented to the press today during the Forum PA 2007 public administration congress at the Nuova Fiera exhibition center in Rome. The agreement has been reached under the FASTWEB convention with CONSIP, the agency of Italy's Ministry for the Economy responsible for IT service management and procurement of network goods and services for the Italian civil service.
The chief executive officers of CONSIP and FASTWEB, Danilo Broggi and Stefano Parisi, and the Rome City Council Officer for Human Resources & Decentralization, Lucio D'Ubaldo, attended the announcement of the new agreement, which will enable Italy's most important contract awarder, one of the country's largest companies with 28,000 employees, to enjoy state-of-the-art voice and data services at the most competitive cost-performance conditions available on the private market.
Rome City Council decided to take up the offer of Italy's second-largest fixed telecommunications services provider through the CONSIP convention (although this is not mandatory for local authorities) after CONSIP selected FASTWEB in 2006 as provider for three fixed telephone and IP connectivity service procurements for the civil service.
Under the agreement, FASTWEB will deploy its new-generation network infrastructure to supply the Rome authority with approximately 14,700 telephone lines in 2,300 sites and offices in the Rome metropolitan area; all the telephone lines requested—analog and ISDN—will terminate directly on FASTWEB's urban central offices in Local Loop Unbundling mode. A voice service exchange will be installed in the authority's main office in Piazza del Campidoglio and an optical fiber link providing connectivity of up to 2.5 Gbit/s will be implemented.
A number of the telephone lines requested by the Rome Council will be enabled for Voice Over IP (VOIP), a technology on which FASTWEB was the forerunner in Italy. Based on the CONSIP list prices, this will allow the city council to cut monthly line charges.
Through the CONSIP Convention, Rome City Council will make an estimated saving of 1 million euro on its telephone bill, equivalent to 10% of the approximately 10 million euro it spent on voice services in 2006.
In addition to voice services, FASTWEB is already activating initial broadband IP connectivity services (ADSL and SHDSL) for the local authority's offices, to create a data network linking offices, agencies and schools to the authority's network, regulated under the CONSIP convention.
For schools in particular, FASTWEB is to test a free "virtual switchboard" service, using VOIP technology, to link Rome's approximately one thousand schools via the Rome City Council call center number (060606).