Fastweb is an odd FTTH player. It was one of the first in Europe, but it didn't deploy fiber to the home in Milan for the same reasons people are doing it in Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm. The core idea of the original Fastweb context was to compete with the incumbent and owning (at the beginning) a fiber infrastructure seemed like a good way to do just that.
Once DSL became an option in Italy with unbundling, Fastweb's rollout of fiber stopped. The expansion was purely LLU. And of course, the volume of non-fiber customers grew much faster, and eventually overcame the volume of fiber customers. In order to have unified marketing, Fastweb's offer was homogeneous regardless of the underlying network.
Until now.
According to Stefano Cazzani, Fastweb has taken a first step to leveraging what is believed to be the single largest FTTH network in Europe. They will soon be offering 100Mb/s service to businesses.
It'll be interesting to follow this more closely, and I hope to be able to find more about this, particularly about potential evolution of the consumer offer. I'm wondering also how well the technology choices made by Fastweb/Metroweb all these years ago fare with today's requirements...
