Beppe Grillo on his website launches a message with the intention of stimulating the Government to accelerate the proposals to be put on the table in Brussels in order to access the financing of the Recovery Fund, but also to unblock investments: "It's time to make courageous choices, supporting the digital development of Italy with an industrial and long-term vision. In fact, digital infrastructures and skills are an essential element to make our country competitive on international markets and a generator of development.
Connectivity, specifies the ideologue of the Star Movement, it is now to be understood in all respects as a "constitutional right". Everything passes and will pass more and more from digital networks. The possibility for all citizens and companies to access a capillary, highly performing and secure infrastructure is essential.
Guaranteeing a right to connectivity means guaranteeing equal access to work, health and education. The Covid-19 emergency has shown us how much access to widespread and high-performance connectivity has an impact on issues of work and industry, on training and education issues, on health issues, but also on issues of sociability and energy.
Guaranteeing a right to connectivity means being able to have a future in which centrality is restored to people, giving value to time and quality of life. This is a democratic issue in the country, which requires a broad political and institutional convergence to be resolved. Doing all this is possible today, you need to have the courage to launch a large industrial market project, not a financial project. A long-term project under the direction of the state, not of foreign investors.
The objective must be to quickly and with a unified vision recover the technological and digital delay accumulated by Italy in recent years, which today constitutes a development and relaunch priority for the country.
We need a project that is able in a short time to unlock huge direct and indirect investments, also using the resources made available by Europe through the Recovery Fund.
We must aim to create a single large aggregator pole of the best digital infrastructures and technologies useful for reducing the Italian digital divide.
In particular, a company is needed that is able to develop a modern, widespread and secure network, and that has all the current and prospective technologies:
- not only fiber optic networks, but also 5G technologies, enabling the internet of things, and the towers in which microcells are installed;
- not only the datacenters and cloud solutions that store and manage all the data of the State, citizens and our companies, but also the skills and technologies in the field of cybersecurity, essential for protecting the security of citizens' data. Data, in fact, represent a patrimony of people, and it is essential that they are protected and that individuals can choose to value them freely, consciously and safely.
For this it is necessary to urgently take all the necessary steps to create an infrastructure that is:
- UNIQUE, in which all the pieces of infrastructure of the various operators can converge. Just double your investments! It is essential to use the available resources efficiently in order to be able to invest continuously, even in the future;
- MULTI TECHNOLOGY, which uses and develops not only optical fiber but all access technologies, such as 5G transmission, data centers, the cloud and edge computing. Today we talk about fiber, but fiber in other countries is already present and they talk and live with 5G. This new company will be responsible for choosing the most efficient way to ensure a quality and widespread connection, regardless of technology. In fact, citizens should not have to worry with which technology it is better to receive the connection. How they don't care about how they get their gas, light or drinking water;
- OPEN AND SEPARATE FROM END CUSTOMERS, so that all service providers can access it freely and at market conditions, whether they are telephone operators or telemedicine service providers, or otherwise.
The creation of this company would make it possible to align such a strategic sector with successful models such as those already tested in the energy world and to introduce a remuneration mechanism linked to the amount of investments made. A single society of digital infrastructures and technologies would also facilitate access to the resources made available by Europe to promote the relaunch of European economies, following an unprecedented crisis such as that linked to the Covid-19 pandemic.
To realize this ambitious project of the single company of communications networks and technologies, it is necessary to start from Telecom Italia, which is still the main telecommunications operator in the country. In recent years, however, Telecom's management has been dictated by short-term financial logic, as management has had no long-term industrial vision. This has generated a continuous depletion of the intrinsic value and know-how of the company, also due to the continuous loss of distinctive skills and professionalism.
This has led to today's Telecom Italia: a former large avant-garde company with a European dimension, which has given rise to many inventions in the field of telecommunications, now reduced to a reality that continues to sell the few family jewels which remained under the guidance of a French investor. An example of this is the path started by the company to accelerate the opening of the capital of its subsidiaries to international private equity investors, aimed exclusively at raising cash to reduce existing debt.
Operations such as the one on INWIT and the project for the partial decommissioning of datacenters currently being studied in partnership with Google are the demonstration of a path, which has been underway for some time, which does not present any underlying industrial rationale.
Lastly, the sale of a piece of the secondary network to the American fund KKR, in a purely financial and not industrial logic, only complicates the project of possible creation of a single network and technology company.
This project envisages, in fact, a “stew” of TIM's infrastructures and the entry of an additional foreign investor (as well as interlocutor) in strategic assets for the country with the sole aim of achieving short-term financial benefits.
This strategy is generating an intrinsic loss of value of the company due to the reduction of future margins, with an enormous risk on the future sustainability of the company also in terms of jobs. In fact, TIM's main shareholder is a foreign entity focused on commercial activities and media content, and does not have an ambitious infrastructure development plan as a priority, which the country is in dire need of.
The time has now come for TIM to reverse the trend with respect to the past, developing a greater focus on technological activities, also through the separation of these activities from the rest of the company perimeter. In particular, it is essential that TIM returns to being a reality that invests heavily and in an integrated manner in communication technologies, both current (such as optical fiber) and prospective (such as 5G), also jointly with other operators. of the sector in a systemic key.
It is desirable that the project to create a single society of networks and technologies be carried out under the guidance and guidance of public institutions with a patient perspective, which are able to guarantee security, stability and development in the long term.
To carry out this ambitious project, it is necessary to think of separating the company in two, keeping the current staff unchanged. It is necessary to divide the services from the infrastructures, finally creating two separate companies. The first company will be focused on commercial activities and services to end customers. The second company will own all infrastructure including: INWIT's towers, mobile network (including 5G), data centers, cloud, Sparkle's international network, and the company on the fiber resulting from the network integration. fixed by Telecom with that of Open Fiber.
Creating a single society of digital infrastructures and technologies would guarantee numerous and obvious advantages, including:
- the acceleration of the installation of fixed (fiber) and mobile (5G) networks and technologies throughout the country for the benefit of the community and businesses. This process would generate a huge saving of financial resources, avoiding duplication of investments in overlapping infrastructures;
- the inversion of the process underway for years of allocating ever-increasing resources to comply with debt repayment plans and in favor of unprofitable businesses to the detriment of support for infrastructure development plans;
- the possibility for other operators to confer their infrastructures further strengthening the “single network” project.
The single infrastructure and technology company should have as its primary shareholder a subject capable of guaranteeing the independence of the network from its users, as well as a very long-term investment horizon.
This result could be obtained by replicating the success model of the important companies that manage the country's energy infrastructures, in which Cassa Depositi e Prestiti represents the reference shareholder in a widespread shareholder context.
The presence of an institution such as Cassa Depositi e Prestiti would, in fact, be synonymous with stability in the shareholding structure and guarantee of massive investments for the development of the country's digital infrastructure.