Rome, September 9 – The Italian telecommunications market is undergoing a restructuring along two opposing paths. According to AGCOM's Communications Observatory No. 2/2026, with data updated to March 2026, the major operators are losing ground in fixed-line services: TIM remains the leader in broadband and ultrabroadband access with 32,6%, down 1,4 points year-over-year; Fastweb+Vodafone stands at 28,7%, down one point; and Wind Tre is stable at 14,7%.
The segment defined as "Others" in the Authority's surveys reached approximately 9,8% of broadband lines in December 2025, up 1,3 percentage points annually from 9,4% in September. The electronic communications sector is worth a total of €29,53 billion and includes approximately 19,37 million broadband and ultrabroadband lines. The Fastweb+Vodafone merger has created a second infrastructure hub on a scale comparable to TIM, while the share of specialized operators is growing.
FTTH lines are up 19,6% year-over-year, coverage reaches 77,6% of households according to the 2026 AGCOM Annual Report, and fixed-line investments reach €6,24 billion, up 10,3%. The transition to full fiber is shifting the competitive landscape: with coverage approaching saturation, competition is focused on the existing customer base rather than new connections. This is the context in which smaller providers operate, which in the residential market are faced with a continuous migration trend among operators fueled by acquisition promotions.
Among these is Ehiweb, a Bologna-based web company active in fiber, VoIP, and mobile, which has built its positioning on customer retention rather than price competition. “In Italy, there are tens of thousands of users who change providers every month,” says Luigi De Luca, co-founder of the company, according to whom the large operators “work a lot on that kind of target interception.” A dynamic that, he argues, "often forces you to offer only a low price and not the valuable service you provide." Founded in 2000 as a domain and hosting reseller and transformed into an LLC in 2004, the company now also operates virtual switchboards and bulk SMS messaging, the latter used for marketing, large-scale retail trade, and two-factor authentication procedures. The declared choice is not to chase volumes: “We don't have to work on millions of users. We need to work on the right ones, ones that are commensurate with our pace,” says De Luca, who points to network engineering and bandwidth management policies as the key technical factors, with progressive increases in capacity based on customer base growth rather than saturation of shared connections. Positioning is reflected in pricing, which the manager acknowledges is not aggressive: “Since we don't have certain below-cost offers, we may initially be perceived as a little more expensive than others,” he specifies. This move places the operator outside of the entry-level promotion segment, historically the sector's main competitive tool in the residential market, where price pressure has made Italy one of the European countries with the lowest rates. The organizational structure has twenty permanent employees, with customer support managed internally in Italy. “We put 20 people in Bologna,” says the manager. It is a more personnel-intensive model than that of large-scale operators, which manage customer service on much larger volumes and with increasing levels of automation, and which translates into a structurally higher incidence of labor costs per user served for small providers. The constraint remains scale. The company reports revenues of around five million euros, a tiny fraction of a market worth nearly thirty billion. This magnitude places the operator in a segment where wholesale network access costs and the investments required for the transition to full fiber impact margins and cannot be amortized over a customer base of millions of users, as is the case with large groups. The sustainability of the model will depend on the specialized segment's ability to defend the price differential at a time when competition is shifting from new connections to the existing base, an area where the lever of permanence is being tested by the larger operators.
Notizie.it editorial team