Wind Tre has achieved the latest stage of its network consolidation project in Milan as part of its wider investment plan.
The operator was formed by the merger of Vimpelcom’s Italian business and Three Italy in late 2016. Work on merging their network infrastructure has already been completed in Trieste, Agrigento and Bologna.
It said that LTE speeds in Milan have been boosted by up to 250 percent, coverage has been improved indoors, and the quality and speed of the network has also increased.
The integration forms part of a five year, €6 billion investment project. Wind Tre said it is in the final stages of modernising the network in Rome, Ascoli Piceno, Alessandria, Bari and Cosenza. It will then turn its attention to equipping 21,000 sites across Italy with 4.5G technology.
It added these sites will be 5G ready as they will be equipped with cloud architecture and fibre.
Jeffrey Hedberg, CEO of Wind Tre, said: “The creation of a single mobile network in Milan through the integration and modernization of the Wind and 3 networks confirms once again Wind Tre’s leadership in responding to customer requirements with innovation and the provisioning of high-quality infrastructure.
“We are delighted at Wind Tre to launch our single network in Milan, leading to substantial improvements in quality, connection speeds and coverage. Wind Tre has committed to invest €6 billion over five years in quality and innovation across all of our ‘customer touchpoints’, and by leveraging this investment we will continue to differentiate ourselves in the market.
“Quality, value and ‘customer experience’ will be the key deliverables as we work with all partners to enable a modern infrastructure and service capability to accelerate Italy’s digital transformation.”
Wind Tre is far from the only operator seeking to improve its network in Italy. In February, TIM said it was working with Ericsson to introduced a virtualised radio access network across the country.
It is also working with Huawei on a small cell project.