Say Fastweb to anyone and it is synonymous with early video experiments in 2000, one of the IPTV pioneers, which began life putting 2 million Italian homes online, by simple throwing fiber into holes being dug to improve the electricity grid in Italy.
Today it is re-iterating a similar plan, this time to take it to 13 million homes from the 7.5 million that it has passes so far, again using fiber and promising broadband speeds of up to 200 Mbps to 50% of Italy, targeting 500 cities, and avoiding a head on confrontation with Telecom Italia, by focusing on medium and small municipalities, far from large Italian urban centers.
It still offers some video, but the image of Fastweb as an IPTV pioneer had gone, as it has no multicast TV channel delivery, which it toyed with for a few years, and instead relies on simpler VoD services, and third parties OTT services for video.
Fastweb will start with Arezzo (population 99,000), Viterbo (64,000), Riccione (34,000), Rimini, Trento, Massa, Pistoia and Caserta. It plans to launch to 1 million new homes by year end but 13 million by 2020.
Fastweb claims to lead the Italian ultra-broadband market, with 650,000 customers, about half of the total in Italy. It will use a variety of Ethernet over both copper and fiber technologies to achieve its goal, which will include fiber to the street cabinets so we presume that means the use of G.fast. Fastweb proposes a total of €2 billion spent on Capex of which €500 million in this upgrade for 2016.
Alberto Calcagno, Chief Executive Officer of Fastweb stated: “The plan which we announced today is vital for Italy. Crucially, it brings speeds of 200 megabits per second to the Italian people, beginning from medium municipalities and the smaller population centers. My hope is that young people in these centers who want to dedicate themselves to digital jobs may do it without needing to move to a big city. We have always rejected a two-speed Italy.”
In 1999, Fastweb was the first operator to construct a fiber to the home network reaching 2 million residences in Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Turin, Rome, Bari and Naples. In 2010, it was the first in Europe to offer residential customers connections of up to 100 Mbps.
In 2007 Swisscom acquired Fastweb, and has long regretted it, when in 2010 a pre-existing VAT fraud was discovered across the entire Italian telecoms segment, implicating executives as Fastweb. In 2014 Swisscom was known to be considering a sale of the business to Vodafone, which never came off, so it’s back to hard graft and investment instead.