Telecoms: Italy

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.

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 Ministry of Communications has started the procedure to assign numbers for the nomadic VoIP service (55xxxxxxxxx) as planned by the new VoIP rules.
Every operators can currently ask for up to 50 blocks of 1.000 numbers each.
Each block costs €11,10.
Numbers will be assigned on a first-come first-served basis.

The National Regulatory Authority (AGCOM) in March 2006 set the basic rules regarding VoIP services. Besides other very important rules (like banning portable geographical number), it also mandates full interconnections among VoIP operators to be deployed at IP level (and not at #7 signalling level).
The NRA gave 120 days to operators to come up with a technical proposal in order to comply with the IP interconnection rule.