Advanced Television

Fastweb fibre reaches 1m homes in Rome

February 10, 2016

By Branislav Pekic in Rome

Italian broadband operator Fastweb has reached 1 million homes and businesses in Rome with broadband access speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

To achieve this result, according to CTO Mario Mella, Fastweb has invested a total of 220 million in Rome to roll out 2,200 kilometres of optical fibre.

The implementation of the project started in 2000 and in 2013 the operator announced it will extend its fibre network to reach 30 per cent of the population in 2016.

After three years of work, Fastweb has now announced that it has achieved 70 per cent fibre coverage of Italy’s capital. In most of the 15 municipalities, the operator has achieved more than 90 per cent coverage and is also working to bring the historic city centre, where it is installing underground cabinets, on the same level of the other municipalities.

This week, Fastweb launched in Rome its WOW-Fi service which uses the existing modems to provide 100,000 free Wi-Fi access points to its network of customers. The WOW-Fi was already available in 46 Italian cities and has a total of 250,000 active hotspots throughout the country.

Fastweb ended 2015 with 2.2 million subscribers, a 6.2 per cent growth on the previous year. Over the past year, the operator connected one million homes to the ultra-high speed broadband service, while Fastweb’s proprietary fibre network reached 6.3 million households and businesses. The target for 2016 is to increase this number to 7.5 million.

Categories: Articles, Broadband