Broadband in Italy: an overview

Emanuela Ciapanna and Daniele Sabbatini ()
Additional contact information
Daniele Sabbatini: Banca d'Italia

No 34, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: High-speed Internet, or broadband, access is an essential infrastructure that has been proven to stimulate competition, productivity and growth and it is considered the engine of the so called knowledge-information economy. In this paper, we first provide a technical survey of the standard broadband technologies (copper wire, optical fiber and Wi-Fi), then based on Eurostat and OECD data, we conduct an analysis regarding the diffusion and average available quality of broadband internet access in Italy. We find that Italy is behind compared to the other OECD countries in both broadband penetration rate and average available speed. The main determinants of this delay are the scarce diffusion of PCs and the persistently low ICT alphabetization of the Italian population, the geographical and density characteristics of the country as well as strategic factors (market structure and bureaucratic constraints). Finally, we examine the main regulations and policy instruments that have been established to foster broadband diffusion and we provide policy indications aimed at improving average quality and reducing digital-divide.

Keywords: broadband; digital divide; unbundling local loop; shared access; bitstream (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 D43 K21 K23 L4 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2008-0034/QEF_34.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_34_08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().