Fastweb has signed an agreement with Rome city council to begin trials of 5G and future Wi-Fi technologies in 2018 with a view to building an IoT and Smart City-focused network in parts of the Italian capital by 2020. The aim of the pilot scheme is to enrich the city’s digital ecosystem by building a platform that supports services and applications in the areas of intelligent mobility, remote sensoring, industry 4.0, tourism and video surveillance, said the operator in a statement.
Rome’s mayor Virginia Raggi commented that the field trial would involve around 3,000 users and would help the capital join the five cities already selected by Italy's Ministry of Economic Development (MISE) for pre-commercial trials of 5G networks. “The MISE has kept us out of the 5G experiments but we are forging ahead alone,” she said. In August the ministry gave the go ahead for Vodafone Italia, Wind Tre, TIM, Fastweb and Open Fiber to conduct 5G trials in Milan, Prato, L’Aquila, Bari and Matera.
Fastweb last week kicked off a campaign to promote its recently-activated 1Gbps ‘UltraFibra’ FTTH service in Rome. The gigabit service also offers upload speeds of up to 200Mbps and will eventually cover 300,000 homes, around a fifth of the city’s total.
