Re: Price per Mbps
The problem is Italy is that, for example, in the most wealthy areas of the North, many people live "dispersed" in smaller cities and towns. For example, Milan has only 1,4M population, many people live in the vast conurbation around it up to the other cities of Lombardy - an area that cannot be defined "rural" only - but which makes reaching them more expensive than cabling larger buildings close to each other. Many are still on ADSL only, not even FTTC. The same happens in Veneto and Emilia-Romagna (they are 1st, 3rd and 4th in Italian GDP...)
At first government gave precedence to the poorer regions of the South for high speed networks - in the hope that a faster Internet would bring more investments to fight unemployment and poverty - but of course it was wrong - high-speed internet alone won't achieve that result, while people with less money have less incentives to get a high speed connection. Some fibre deployments assigned to the incumbent were even left "swtiched off" because no operator was interested to offer the service. Now they think to offer "vouchers" to incentivize it....
Then government adopted a different approach to cover the remaining areas - using public and EU funds and putting up a tender. The incumbent TIM proposed a FTTC project using its copper network - a new competitor proposed a new FTTP network and won. The new network will be public (being paid with public money) but the company deploying will manage it for 20yrs - but can sell the network use wholesale only.
That project is now about a year late, and won't be probably completed in 2021. The first hundred or so areas (each area is more or less the territory of a small town, some larger, up to some tens thousand people, other small, some thousands or less) have been activated in the second half of the past year, more should be activated this year. The architecture uses GPON with 1:16 splitting, and the actual offerings are 1Gb down and up to 300Mb up (depends on the provider) for about 25-30€, usually including phone calls which are delivered via VoIP.
It will be interesting to know now if the FTTP adoption will increase and justify the investments. One of the problems is the ex-monopolist is trying whatever it can to delay deployments while trying to take control of the new network asking the government to force a merger.
It could become a case study of the issues when deploying a new network....