Telecoms: Italy

“UNICO” is the brand name chosen by Telecom Italia for its the fixed-mobile telephone, based on UMA technology, which functions as a multimedia cordless in the home, using the IP network, and as a GSM mobile phone outside.
Offered as an optional service at 15 euro a month on top of the ADSL access fee, “UNICO” permits calls from home to all fixed-line phones and TIM mobile phones without additional costs; outside the home, “UNICO” permits calls at 0 cost to two TIM mobile numbers and one fixed-line number. Billing will be kept separate for mobile and indoor use. The first handset offered by Telecom Italia, which will be on the market in July, will be the Samsung SGH P200.
Long announced by Telecom Italia one of its first converged fixed-mobile services, it will certainly stirs complaints from other OLOs and ISPs, because it is not replicable buying wholesale capacity from Telecom Italia. Moreover, no MVNO exist in Italy yet.
Actually, Wind is the only competing OLO owning both a fixed and a mobile network in Italy, but so far it has not announced any plan to deploy UMA technology.

While some mobile network operators in the world apparently try to block IP traffic, here in Italy 3 has taken the opposite approach. It signed a co-operation agreement with Skype in order to promote VoIP technology, both on fixed networks and on mobile networks.

3 started promoting some bundles that include also Skype products and services and more are planned in the next few months. One of the first examples of this product offering is a bundle targeted to SoHo/SME customers that includes a UMTS PC Card, a notebook computer supplied by Toshiba, Skype software and a Skype headset.

The Italian National Regulatory Authority is expected to endorse soon an asymmetrical regulation concerning the wholesale fixed call termination rates.

Alternative network operators will be allowed to charge higher termination rates for the next four years before reaching symmetry with Telecom Italia.

In fiscal year 2005 ended on 31 March 2006, BT Albacom had revenues of 753 M€ (+13,4% ), excluding the effect of the Atlanet acquisition, due to be consolidated in next year’s results.
EBITDA was 62,3 M€ (+62,3%) and EBIT – 4M€ (+94%).

BT Albacom claims to have 250.000 business customers in Italy, of which 30.000 use its VoIP services.

In fiscal year 2006 ended on 31 March 2006, Vodafone had revenues of 8,324 M€ (+2% ). EBITDA was 4,334 M€ (-0.5%) and EBIT 3,197 M€ (-0.5%).

Vodafone Italia claims to have at end of March 2006 24.056.000 (+6.9%) total customers and 2.928.000 UMTS customers in Italy.

ARPU was down to 28.5 € (-1 €) and churn rate went up to 18.7 % (+ 1.5%).

Elitel today announced the availability of a converged fixed-mobile service targeted to its business customers.
Thanks to a dual-mode Wi-Fi/GSM handset supplied by Qtek, Elitel is offering the converged option to its business VoIP customers.
A similar converged offer targeted to business customers has been recently announced also by BT Albacom.
However, for both solutions the fixed and mobile bills will be kept separated, because none of the fixed line operators can act as mobile virtual network operator yet.

Elitel confirmed its ambition to become a full fledged virtual mobile network operator. So far it has announced the availability of a converged fixed-mobile service based on dual mode Wi-Fi/GSM handsets, but the company is confident to sign a wholesale agreement with a major mobile network operator in the next few months in order to be able to offer also unified fixed-mobile billings to its business customers.
The company also announced that anytime soon it will sign a roaming agreement regarding Wi-Fi hotspots.

Starting with the next ‘Serie A’ football season in September 2006, Telecom Italia will offer its premium content with a ‘converged’ subscription model. Through a single subscription, Telecom Italia’s customers will be able to watch live football matches delivered over IPTV (ADSL + set-top box), broadband connections (ADSL + PC) and mobile (DVB-H equipped handsets).

In fiscal year 2005, Elitel had revenues of 155 M€, 25% of which came from wholesale service, 33% from small business retail, 14% from large accounts, 19% from premium services and 9% from call center operations.
Elitel claims to serve 2.274 large accounts in Italy, of which 773 already use its VoIP services.

According to Finmeccanica, the Italian Government will finally unlock funds for a big nationwide TETRA-based project.
As reported from the company's own blog:

The new government must "quickly" unlock the 500
mln euro previously allocated for the supplying of the crypted TLC system
'Tetra' to the Italian police forces, said Selex Communications
(Finmeccanica Group) CEO Massimo Tucci. "A first decision was taken in June
2005, and a second in March 2006: the sum has already been transferred to
the Interior Ministry, we only need the minister's signature to ratify it
and allocate the fund". "To us, Tetra can be what GSM has been for
Scandinavian countries: if we'll be up to it, we can really give new
momentum to the national economy. We don't fear competition, but we can't
affor to waste more time"

Italtel will soon be floated on the Milan Stock Exchange. This company is the only survived Italian ‘national champion’ in the telecom equipment sector. Its roots date back to the year 1921 and the company has historically been one of the key supplier of the incumbent Telecom Italia, which still owns about 20% of it.
The Milan-based company survived several ‘revolutions’ and reinvented himself more than once, it is focusing now on softswitches for Next Generation Networks.

At last someone is starting to compete with Telecom Italia in the broadband wholesale market. Tiscali Business Services has recently improved its wholesale portfolio. It now offers also wholesale ADSL2+-based services and co-locations thanks to its own nation-wide backbone and ULL sites.

Mobile number portability (MNP) has been suffering for a long time in Italy due to massive demand by consumers. In country with a mobile penetration rate in excess of 120%, MNP is an increasingly important tool to foster competition.
In order to help easing the backlog of MNP requests, the National Regulatory Authority ordered all mobile network operators to increase the minimum number of number portability requests handled per day.

From next July, MIX (Milan Internet eXchange) will adopt a new pricing scheme for Internet peering traffic.

Italian engineering company Sielte bought the local “Build and Service Engineering” division from Siemens. Sielte is one of the main Italian contractor that designs, deploys, installs and test mobile radio sites. Thanks to this acquisition, Sielte will add 80 people to its workforce.

The Italian National Regulatory Autority (AGCOM) banned the new convergent fixed-mobile UMA service due to be launched by Telecom Italia next July.
AGCOM ordered Telecom Italia to suspend its planned UNICO service because it cannot be replicated by alternative operators due to lack of an equivalent wholesale offer

Low speed leased lines (analog and digital lines up to 2 Mbit/s) offered by incumbent Telecom Italia to its retail customers will be subject to a price cap of CPI-7% effective January 2007.

The National Regulatory Authority (AGCOM) declared that the high speed (> 2 Mbit/s) retail leased lines market is competitive. Therefore, incumbent Telecom Italia will not be subject to ex-ante regulation anymore.

Telecom Italia announced that from mid September it will offer a full wholesale ADSL2+-based service to OLOs and ISPs.

Parla.it decided to abandon the H.323 protocol favouring SIP for its VoIP services.

Telecom Italia is likely to support new mobile applications based on Qualcomm’s Brew operating systems.

The VoIPex consortium, supported by many institutions and several telecom operators and equipment vendors is pushing hard in order to run and to certify interoperability tests for VoIP applications.

According to unconfirmed sources, Telecom Italia is planning a new UMA-based converged offer targeted to business users.

The results of a market research on Mobile VAS have been announced today in a press conference at Politecnico di Milano.
Mobile VAS Market value in 2005 was about 1 billion €. By the end of 2006 the market value is expected to grow till about 1.5 billion €.

3 has just launched a new file sharing service for its mobile business customers.

Italian nano-PC specialist Eurotech unveiled ‘Zypad’, a wrist-worn PC that weighs just 290 grams.

From next August 1st, Telecom Italia will increase the cost of SMS messages sent by its fixed line customers to mobile users.

Telecom Italia decided to open its mobile network to allow competing fixed-mobile integrated services based on UMA technology.