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More than 50% of Italy’s fixed broadband lines above 100 Mb/s

Italy is speeding up the roll-out of all-fibre ultrafast broadband coverage to boost productivity and close the gap with other major European economies. Prime Minister Draghi’s Government plans to spend over 8 billion euros in EU funding on broadband, 5G and satellite technologies. The ambition is to have 1Gb/s connections available to all Italians by 2026.

The 2015 Italian strategy for next generation access network (SNBUL) aims to maximise take-up of infrastructure that can guarantee 100 Mb/s for at least 85% of households and provide coverage of at least 30 Mbps to all citizens. Coverage with connections of 30 megabytes or higher has increased significantly in recent years, and Italy is now in line with the EU average.

 

Roll-out of high-speed broadband technologies has boosted speeds in excess of 30 Mb/s from 15 percent of the total at the end of 2016 to 67.2 percent at the end of 2020. Italy’s copper-based lines dropped to 36.3 percent of the fixed network total at the end of 2020. This represents a down 10.7 percent year on year and 47.1 percent since 2016.

In recent years, broadband coverage in Italy has improved significantly. In 2015, Telecom Italia began upgrading its fixed network, for example, and recently Open Fiber invested significantly in fibre, offering services on a wholesale basis. According to the latest Broadband Coverage in Europe study, designed to monitor the progress of EU Member States toward their specific broadband coverage objectives, nearly all (99.6%) of Italian households were covered by at least one fixed broadband network by mid-2018. Fixed broadband was available to 97.3% of rural households and Very High Capacity Networks (VHCN) passed 30.0% of Italian households at a national level, and 2.1% of rural households.

According to a 2020 speed test study from Sostrafriffe.it, internet speeds in Italy are increasing across all region at an average of 22.86% (with the exception of the Aosta Valley). In Central Italy, increases of up to 50% have been realised. Italy has also adopted a national state aid scheme to support broadband in areas insufficiently covered by the market.