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Telecommunications infrastructure
Telecom infrastructure is mainly in the hands of Telecom Italia. Regulatory authority is still evaluating whether to force the incumbent to unbundle its network, and many would be competitors are still deciding if it would be better for them to be facility based or not. Telecom Italia has an almost fully digitized circuit-switched network serving approximately 26 million lines, about 10% of which are ISDN. It has more than two million kilometers of fibre in the long distance network and about half a million in the access network. Most of the infrastructure investments are made by Infostrada and Omnitel . Few companies have begun to build their own local networks, for example in Milan, which has the highest concentration of business activities. City governments that must authorize digging and putting new lines have been very slow to understand the importance of a new telecommunications infrastructure.
Telephone
(Source: ITU Telecommunications Database 1998)
% of households with telephone: 96.9%
Main telephone lines per 1000 inhabitants: 450.1
% of automatic main lines: 100%
Residential telephone connection charge (USD): $ 137.1
Residential monthly telephone subscription: $ 9.4
Business monthly telephone subscription: $ 14.6
Cost of 3 min. local call: $ 0.1
Cellular mobile telephone subscribers: 20,489,000
High speed lines
Deployment of fiber optic cable (km) 1997
(Source: OECD Communications Outlook, 1999)
| Austria | 152,584 |
| Czech Republic | 438,634 |
| Finland | 647,121 |
| France | 1,700,000 |
| Germany | 149,200 |
| Greece | 11,240 |
| Ireland | 40,015 |
| Italy | 2,444,000 |
| Netherlands | 31,000 |
| Spain | 47,030 |
| United Kingdom | 471,627 |
| United States | 19,263,000 |
ISDN subscribers
(Source: OECD Communications Outlook, 1999)
| | 1993 | 1997 |
| Austria | 16,813 | 85,683 |
| Belgium | 28,071 | 96,548 |
| Finland | 6,416 | 57,855 |
| Greece | 303 | 2,564 |
| Italy | 49,061 | 335,000 |
| Japan | 463 | 2,065,288 |
| Netherlands | 23,700 | 279,000 |
| Portugal | 7,891 | 47,845 |
| United Kingdom | 132,500 | 1,174,950 |
Satellite earth stations-3 Intelsat (with a total of 5 antennas - 3 for Atlantic Ocean and 2 for Indian Ocean), 1 Inmarsat (Atlantic Ocean region), and NA Eutelsat
Submarine cables: 21
Examples of submarine fiber optic cable system:
- Columbus III Cable System -- A 10,000 km or 6250 mile, two-fiber pair system
stretching across the Atlantic from Florida to Portugal and
continuing on to Mazara,Italy. It is able to carry up to a half a million calls simultaneously. (http://www.pretext.com/mar98/features/ao3map.htm)
- The LEV Submarine System connects Tel Aviv (Israel) and Mazara Del Vallo (Sicily) with a Branching Unit to Yeroskipos (Cyprus).
The system is in commercial service since March 1999.The cable is composed of two fiber optic pairs able to transport a capacity of 20 Gb/s (equal to approx.250,000 simultaneous telephone calls) each using the Wave Division Multiplex technique. The equipped capacity at this initial stage is 5 Gb/s expandable to the maximum design capacity of 20 Gb/s by installing additional equipment at the terminal stations. The length of the LEV System is 2,600 Km and it is equipped with 30 optical repeaters.
- Other systems connecting: Greece-Italy, Italy-Tunisia, Italy-Turkey-Ukraine-Russia (ITUR)
Sourcehttp://www.pretext.com/mar98/features/ao3map.htm
International Internet bandwidth by country
Source http://www.oecd.org
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