Angelo Romagnoli
Italy to roll out WiMAX
Earlier last week Italy's minister of Communications Paolo Gentiloni and the minister of Defence Arturo Parisi agreed on a plan for the deployment of WiMAX-related technologies in Italy, to begin in mid-2007. Reportedly, 3.5GHz frequency lots would be made available to the market players according to a detailed 'roadmap', which the two ministries will make public by the end of February.Comment: This is very good news in principle. WiMAX will make it easier to provide broadband in those hard-to-reach areas, of which Italy has many. We also expect this to boost the LLU competition (which is faltering locally) and to offer further robust support to the transmission of IP data in a country that just a few weeks ago experienced several days without service from the main local ISPs - which was eventually blamed on the state of the infrastructure. The ministry of Defence, which owns the 3.5GHz frequencies, had previously demanded a €400 million refund for frequency reallocation. There is no mention of that amount in the press release, but the possibility of drawing on the resources from the newborn WiMAX market is explicitly mentioned. This could result in either higher costs for the end-user and/or the exclusion of smaller ISPs from the expensive licence competition - to the advantage of the 'big fish'. We will have to wait until February for further details on how the government intends to seek compensation.We also anticipate the recommendations from Italy's AGCOM (Autorità delle Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni), which will be essential in defining the WiMAX 'road map' and in ascertaining whether it will affect market competition.
