Iliad enters Italian fixed-line market with Open Fiber

Iliad’s low-cost Italian mobile service has seen considerable success since its launch two years ago, capturing around 6 million customers, around 7% of the countries mobile market. Almost since its Italian launch, Iliad has been pondering an entrance into the country’s fixed-line market, and now, with the help of a new deal with neutral fibre infrastructure provider Open Fiber, their broadband offering will soon be commercially available.

 

The deal will see Iliad use Open Fiber’s infrastructure to provide connectivity to 271 Italian cities by 2022.

 

The primary motivation for the move appears to be the chance to offer convergent services, which Iliad believes will boost ARPU. 

 

“Growing demand for fixed connectivity over the few past months has driven us to accelerate toward our debut in the fixed segment and the agreement with Open Fiber is the first step in that direction”, said Benedetto Levi, chief executive of Iliad’s Italian operations, in a statement.

 

Levi also noted that due to wholesale availability, an initial entrance into the Italian fixed market was not prohibitively expensive. Indeed, Iliad is not the only major player to take advantage of Open Fiber’s wholesale offers recently; a deal with Sky Italia back in March saw the launch of Sky Wifi in 26 cities across the country just last month, with more deployments to follow.

 

 “In less than three years Open Fiber has become a leader in Italy and Europe in new generation fiber networks and the reference infrastructure for all the main digitalization players in our country,” said Elisabetta Ripa, CEO of Open Fiber. “Our entirely fibre-optic network is the only one capable of enabling the best available technology to develop services that bring benefits to citizens and businesses, helping to bridge the digital divide that Italy still suffers from the European average due decades of missed investments in the fixed network.”

 

Open Fiber continues to be a vitally important player in the Italian market, with the Italian government urging it to work together with Telecom Italia (TIM) to create a single network. At the end of last month, infrastructure fund Macquarie made a bid to purchase all or part of Entel’s 50% stake in Open Fiber – a move which many believe could lead to a much faster creation of a single national network.