Telecoms: Italy

Telecom Italia’s Board of Directors has mandated senior management to negotiate the possible sale of the Group’s mobile activities in Brazil, with a commitment to refer to the Board of Directors speedily for the formalization of the relative final decisions.

An administrative court (TAR) blocked the fastest ADSL service offered by Telecom Italia, branded Alice 20 Mega. The Court ruled that Telecom Italia cannot sell Alice 20 Mega because it does not offer a suitable wholesale service to other OLOs and ISPs.

The National Regulatory Authority started a 60 days long public consultation process to better define rules for awarding the long-awaited WiMAX licenses for broadband wireless access on the 3.5 GHz band.

Vodafone started targeting foreigners living in Italy and it launched a new pre-paid tariffs supported by a multilingual advertising campaign.

After more then 15 years of paying 5 € each time the buy a recharge from their mobile operators, Italian consumers might get some help from the NRA, which might soon ban such a practise, estimated to be worth 1.7 € bn a year for the mobile network operators.

The Milan Internet eXchange (MIX), the primary Internet exchange point in Italy, has opened a new VoIP service to facilitate inter-carrier VoIP peering and interconnection.

According to an analysis run by Internet performance monitoring company Renesys, Telecom Italia Sparkle has resulted as the largest IP carrier in terms of transit relationships in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin

AGCOM, the National Regulatory Authority, is forcing all mobile network operators to adopt more stringent parental control techniques.

Telecom Italia published the new interconnection reference for 2007 offer containing all its wholesale services available to OLOs and ISPs.

Italtel announced that has reached an agreement with Greek alternative operator Tellas to supply a Next Generation Network (NGN) for innovative Voice and IP services and the deployment of a Metro Ethernet Network.

After six years and € 3 bn invested in Italy, Fastweb have breached the 1 million broadband customers mark.

STMicroelectronics inaugurated a new MEMS production line in Milan that will boost its capacity to deliver its state-of-art sensors targeted to consumer applications, including next-generation mobile handsets.