CompanyGraph
Telecom Italia S.p.A.
0H6I · Italy
Runs Italy's only nationwide copper phone network and leases it to rivals while building fiber across 8,000 towns.
Telecom Italia owns the copper wiring that runs into Italian homes and businesses — a network laid before 1997 when the company was still a state monopoly, and one that no competitor has ever duplicated. Any rival wanting to offer fixed-line service must therefore lease access to those wires under wholesale prices set by the regulator AGCOM, which means Telecom Italia earns a recurring fee from the very competitors trying to undercut it. To eventually replace the aging copper with fiber, Telecom Italia must collect a separate construction permit from each of Italy's 8,000 local governments, and because those approvals cannot be batched or bought in bulk, each town where the permit queue stalls is a town where copper — and its capped regulated pricing — remains the only route to the customer. If AGCOM cut wholesale rates below the cost of maintaining the copper, or if a state-backed fiber operator somehow cleared all 8,000 permit queues at once, the inherited network would stop being a captive revenue source and become an expensive liability with nothing to offset it.
How does this company make money?
Italian households and businesses pay a monthly fee for fixed-line and mobile service. Rival telecoms companies that use Telecom Italia's copper wires to reach their own customers pay wholesale access charges — a recurring fee for renting the network. In Brazil, TIM Brasil collects monthly subscription and data plan fees from its mobile customers. Telecom Italia also earns revenue by selling cloud storage and cybersecurity services to large business customers under longer-term contracts.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Enterprise customers who want to move their fixed-line service to another provider face a lengthy number porting process and have to reconfigure their internal phone systems, known as PBX systems, which takes time and money. Competitors who have signed wholesale access agreements with Telecom Italia face regulatory steps before those arrangements can be ended. In Brazil, TIM Brasil subscribers who want to change carriers must replace their SIM card and, in many cases, unlock their handset before another network will accept it.
What limits this company?
Telecom Italia is replacing old copper with faster fiber, but every town in Italy — all 8,000 of them — controls its own permits for digging up streets and installing cables. Each local authority runs its own approval process on its own timeline. No amount of money speeds that up, because the bottleneck is bureaucratic coordination, not cash. Until fiber reaches a town, the copper wire there stays the only route, and the revenue it earns stays capped at whatever price AGCOM sets for wholesale access.
What does this company depend on?
Telecom Italia cannot operate without the Italian spectrum licenses for 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G frequencies that AGCOM allocates; the inherited copper wire infrastructure itself, which underpins the entire fixed-line business; fiber optic cables for its ongoing ultrabroadband buildout; Brazilian spectrum licenses for its TIM Brasil mobile business; and network equipment from Ericsson and Nokia to run its 5G deployment.
Who depends on this company?
Italian businesses rely on the copper network for payment processing and internal communications — if those lines went down, transactions would stop and offices would go dark. TIM Brasil subscribers in Brazil depend on the mobile service for everyday banking and online shopping; losing that signal would cut off millions of people from those services. Italian government agencies are building their digital public services on top of the ultrabroadband infrastructure Telecom Italia is rolling out, so delays or failures there slow down the government's own modernization plans.
How does this company scale?
Capacity on existing towers and fiber can be increased relatively cheaply by improving software that manages the network and by using spectrum more efficiently — no new physical construction required. But adding new fiber routes into towns that do not yet have it cannot be sped up the same way, because each of Italy's 8,000 local governments must approve the work individually. That permitting process stays slow no matter how large Telecom Italia grows.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
The European Union has set a target of full gigabit internet coverage across member countries by 2030, which forces Telecom Italia to accelerate fiber investment faster than its permit queue naturally allows. In Brazil, the value of the Brazilian real against the euro moves up and down, which means TIM Brasil's revenues shrink or grow in euro terms even if nothing changes about the business itself. Back in Italy, a set of rules called golden power regulations lets the Italian government block or restrict foreign investors from buying into telecommunications assets it considers strategically important.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
Two things could turn the copper network from an asset into a burden. First, if AGCOM cut the regulated rental price so low that the fees collected no longer cover the cost of maintaining the wires, Telecom Italia would be legally required to keep running a network that loses money on every line. Second, if a state-backed competitor received blanket national permits that bypassed the 8,000-town queue and built a fiber network into every Italian home, companies and consumers would no longer need Telecom Italia's copper at all — leaving it as old wire that must still be maintained but generates nothing.