TIM confirms its position as 4G leader in Italy surpassing the milestone of 1,000 municipalities covered. The Italian cities already covered by the new LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile network jumps to 1,138, providing outdoor coverage of over 60.5% of the nation's population, increasing to around 80% by 2016. All municipalities with more than 35,000 residents will be covered by the 4G network by the end of this year.
This is an important result thanks to the substantial investments of Telecom Italia for technological innovation (fixed networks, mobile networks and cloud computing platforms), amounting to over 3.4 billion Euro in the three-year period 2014-16, confirming the company's intention to provide the country with increasingly modern infrastructure and ability to offer technologically advanced services that meet the growing demand for mobile broadband generated by mobile phones, dongles, smartphones and tablets.
Telecom Italia has also already launched the public testing of services based on LTE Advanced technology, the evolution of the 4G network that allows reaching a connection speed of up to 180 megabits per second, about twice the maximum currently available on Italian mobile networks. The company is making LTE Advanced technology available from various radio-based stations throughout Italy, starting with the major cities and guaranteeing use across the country. The commercial launch of the services is expected in the coming months with the availability of enabled terminals.
The strong impulse to 4G is additional to the enhancement of the 3G network, with speed of up to 42.2 Mbps (HSPA+), which already covers about 2,400 Italian municipalities corresponding to 59% of Italy's population. A network that has been awarded first place in Italy for download and upload speed and safe protected navigation, according to survey results on the quality of mobile data service by Agcom.
To navigate from Smartphones, Tablets and PCs with the new technology TIM's Internet 4G LTE offer is available for consumers customers and business customers. All details of the 4G LTE offers and products are available on the websites:
www.tim.it/internet/ultra-internet-4G-LTE (for Consumer customers) and www.impresasemplice.it/offerte-ultra-internet (for Business customers).
Rome, 31 July 2014
