Milanese Mystery

I have expressed in the past my surprise at Fastweb's strategy of not leveraging their fiber infrastructure in Milan for consumer services. They sell the exact same services in Milan over fiber and in the rest of Italy over DSL. While I can understand the logic behind a unified national offer, which allows for unified advertising, sales process, provisioning, etc. I was still puzzled that they wouldn't at least experiment with fiber grade services in Milan.

I was in Milan last week for a conference, and came out even more puzzled, since I learned to my great surprise that Fastweb passes 2 million homes in Milan yet only has about 200.000 FTTH customers. I nearly fell off my chair when I heard that (from Fastweb's CTO who was speaking at the conference, so presumably a reliable source). Considering the cost of deployment of a fiber infrastructure, one would think that you would do anything to gain more customers onto the fiber network, and that offering fiber grade services could be a good way of differentiating from DSL and therefore increasing take-up.

Now I quesried all I could locally and thought that maybe their definition of homes passed was such that the cost to connect the end customer upon signing was still considerable. Turns out that yes, a home passed is not actually connected, but that the fiber is within inches of each building/home and the cost to connect not all that high apparently (again, according to Fastweb).

So I really don't get it. If anyone out there who knows Fastweb can help me figure it out, I'd be very grateful!