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European Commission rules Italian plan will not distort competition nor inhibit private investment.
The Italian government on Thursday got the green light from the European Commission to push ahead with plans to invest in ultra broadband rollout in uneconomic areas.
The Italian ultra broadband scheme, which carries a budget of around €4 billion, is in line with the EU’s state aid rules, the Commission said, noting that it will spread the availability of fast Internet connections, without distorting competition.
"The broadband scheme will bring faster Internet to Italian consumers and businesses. It will help Italy to build the necessary infrastructure and contribute to creating a connected Digital Single Market in the EU," European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager commented.
"Thanks to good cooperation with Italy, we have been able to finalise the assessment of the scheme very swiftly," she said.
According to the statement issued by the EU, Italy’s ultra broadband scheme will contribute to the country’s goal of providing 85% of households and all public buildings with 100 Mbps broadband and will run until the end of 2022. The Italian state will finance the new infrastructure in full, but will select a licensee to operate the network, it said.
The details do not exactly match the ultrafast broadband plan detailed by Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi in August last year, when he explained that the state would provide €7 billion of funding – €4.9 billion from the government and €2.1 billion from regional institutional funds – as part of a €12 billion project to make ultrafast broadband available to all Italian citizens by 2020.
However, the scheme presented to the EU clearly forms part of the same over-arching goal: to enable the state to contribute to making high-speed Internet services much more widely available.
The Commission said it assessed the Italian plan under its state aid rules with the aim of ensuring that public funding does not replace private investment and that multiple service providers are able to use the infrastructure on a non-discriminatory basis, thereby protecting competition.
The Italian plan makes provision for public money to be spent on underserved areas where end users have no access to speeds in excess of 30 Mbps. It will also foster competition between operators, the Commission said.
