TIM and Infratel Italia: Free and open WiFi in every Italian municipality

TIM and Infratel Italia have signed an agreement that will give citizens and tourists alike free and easy access to the WiFi connections available in the Italian municipalities that will join the Piazza WiFi Italia project. Created on the initiative of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development and awarded to Infratel Italia, the project aims to provide a free and widespread WiFi network throughout the country and provides for the creation of WiFi connections, with free access, in one or more squares of the about 8,000 municipalities covered by the initiative.

In particular, TIM has won the tender launched by Infratel Italia to bring WiFi connections to over 5,500 Italian municipalities with more than 2,000 inhabitants, with the aim of integrating and expanding the existing project for about 2,500 municipalities with up to 2,000 inhabitants, also managed by TIM, as part of the Consip LAN agreement.

In a competition that saw the participation of many players in the sector, TIM's proposal was the best from both a technical and economic point of view, ranking first in the 5 lots into which the entire national territory was divided. The total value of the project is approximately 33 million euros. The agreement provides for the supply and installation of access points and management and control systems, supervision services for the installed equipment and maintenance of the equipment for the distribution of multimedia content on IP-Content Delivery Network platforms.

Thanks to this initiative, citizens and tourists, both Italian and foreign, can connect for free to the individual WiFi networks by downloading the WiFi.Italia.it App (available for Android and IOS), which offers a single, simple access system to the networks around the country belonging to the Piazza WiFi Italia initiative.

To join the project, municipal authorities need to sign a special agreement with Infratel Italia (information and forms can be downloaded from the website https://www.wifi.italia.it).

The initiative is an important tool to spread the use of digital services and confirms TIM and Infratel Italia’s commitment to promoting access to new technologies by an ever-growing pool of citizens, institutions and businesses.