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Italy’s deputy prime minister told members of the Italian press that it was in the national interest for Italy to have just one provider for its full fibre broadband services
Italy’s government is looking at plans to create a single, nationwide broadband provider, in an attempt to streamline the rollout of full fibre, gigabit broadband services.
According to a report by Reuters, the Italian government will submit a formal plan by the end of the year.
"We are working to set the conditions in order to create a single player to distribute internet and broadband," Italy’s deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, was quoted as saying.
The as yet unspecified plans would require a potentially tricky merger between Telecom Italia and Open Fiber, which the Italian government has invested heavily.
Telecom Italia is currently in the process of creating a separate company, NetCo, which will hold all of its network infrastructure hardware. It is unclear how the prospective merger would affect NetCo.
In a recent report which ranked the world’s nations for their average broadband speeds, Italy came 41st, with an average download speed of 15.1Mbps – lagging considerably behind world leaders Singapore (60.39Mbps) and European leaders Sweden (46.0Mbps).
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