The tension between the major Italian telecommunications providers Italians and FiberCop has reached a maximum alert level.
Ahead of the crucial AGCOM Council meeting scheduled for July 22, a unified front formed by Fastweb+Vodafone together with WindTre, Sky Italia and Iliad has formally asked the regulator to reject in full the new wholesale tariffs presented by the network operator on 15 April.
The telecommunications companies denounce a tariff plan deemed lacking the essential requirements of fairness and reasonableness, warning that any potential increase in wholesale costs would inevitably translate into higher bills for end users, without, moreover, ensuring the infrastructural development envisioned.
Italian operators ask AGCOM for help, FiberCop prices too high
The signatory companies of the letter sent to AGCOM show no intention of compromising on partial interventions. According to the leaders of these companies, applying simple cosmetic corrections or marginal changes to the April price list would not resolve the deep criticisms of the proposal.
The entire tariff framework is considered unbalanced and not in line with safeguarding healthy competition. The request is therefore clear: a complete rejection of the document. An approval conditioned or limited by the Authority would end up only validating an economic model perceived as severely penalizing the entire sector.
A heavily contested aspect of the FiberCop plan concerns the use of a European benchmark drafted by the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, used to justify the pricing maneuver. The signatories of the letter point out evident methodological limitations in this analysis, deeming it entirely inapplicable to the Italian context.
Specifically, the study selects the markets of the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium. These are three nations that expose retail tariffs significantly higher than Italy, operating under different rules and recording fiber optic coverage far less extensive than the national territory.
Based on these discrepancies, the companies ask to cancel any justificatory value assigned to this document.
The reference contract and the price increase alarm
In place of foreign comparisons, the operators propose adopting an internal, objective and already in force parameter: the Master Service Agreement that governs the relationship between FiberCop and TIM.
This contract is deemed the only solid and verifiable standard on which to calculate the maximum costs recoverable from the other companies.
The companies then dismantle the theory that current margins would allow absorbing the additional costs without weighing on citizens. Conversely, the gap between wholesale and retail prices in Italy is already extremely narrow compared with continental standards. Any additional charges would be directly borne by households.
Finally, the idea that higher tariffs would incentivize network expansion is rejected. Data show that European countries with the highest wholesale costs are exactly those that struggle most to wire the territory, debunking the hypothesis that higher revenues automatically lead to larger investments.
