In the general rush of all mobile phone companies desperately try not to get sidelined, Vodafone Italy have just announced a tie-up with Italian broadband provider, FastWeb.

Customers will be be able to use their normal Vodafone services on their mobiles, make mobile voice calls to fixed line phones at fixed rates whilst at home and have access to Fastweb’s broadband network, which covers approximately half the population of Italy at speeds of up to 20Mbps.

FastWeb bill themselves as “Italy’s leading alternative broadband provider,” and with under a million customers (874,300), they’ll benefit from having Vodafone selling their services from Vodafone shops around Italy as well as to their current 24m cellular customers.

If mobile companies don’t start offering fixed line services, they feel they’ll lose customers to people who do, with the single bill for all communications being the strongest pull.

We recently reported that O2 Germany has gone the same route offering DSL, Vodafone UK tied up with BT and Vodafone Germany launched similar services on 1 Sept.

Vodafone Italy
FastWeb

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