As part of a newly announced 2014-16 Strategic Plan, Telecom Italia will sell its subsidiary, Telecom Argentina, will accelerating the rollout of LTE and its next gen, broadband access network in its home market. An offer for Telecom Argentina has already been received and management is preparing to act on it.
The CEO Marco Patuano stated: “The Plan for the three year period 2014-2016 envisages some extraordinary transactions intended to strengthen the Group. These will allow us to boost development of ultrabroadband and accelerate our converging business strategy, and to achieve greater financial flexibility, preparatory to our achieving metrics over the life of the plan that are coherent with ‘investment grade’ status.”
In Italy, the plan envisages investments of approximately 9 billion euros over three years, of which 3.4 billion euros solely for latest generation:
- 1.8 billion euros for the development of fixed ultrabroadband using optical fibre for the access segment;
- 900 million euros for mobile ultrabroadband;
- approximately 700 million euros for the creation of new data centres dedicated to the development of cloud computing and international fibre connections.
By 2016, Telecom Italia expects its NGN access network to reach 50% of the population, with 12.4 million homes connected. Telecom Italia’s LTE should cover 80% of the population in that time frame.
Regarding the NGN, the Telecom Italia Board of Directors has approved a voluntary separation of the access network, giving priority to the creation of the “Equivalence of Input ” (EoI) model through functional separation, with particular reference to the offer of unbundling of the local loop (ULL) and virtual unbundling local access (VULA) for the new generation networks based on FTTCab and FTTH architectures.
