Friuli VG grows with connections

Listen to the audio version of the article

Digital infrastructures accompany the growth of Friuli Venezia Giulia. In Trieste, the event “FVG connect – Innovative infrastructures and investments for the development of the Region”, promoted by Open Fiber together with Vodafone and Bat, took stock of the situation.

“The fiber optic network that Open Fiber is building throughout Italy – said the CEO of Open Fiber Mario Rossetti – takes on a social value particularly in the villages and more isolated areas, where we have accelerated to complete the White Areas plan so that all citizens can take advantage of the most advanced digital services, just like the inhabitants of big cities. A plan that in FVG is already almost completed. We have already invested 110 million euros in the region and we will invest a further 100 to reach cities, small towns and industrial areas. The possibility of accessing an ultra-fast connection also represents a driver for the development of production activities, from industry 4.0 to smart agriculture”.

Not only cities and towns, but also ports, airports and motorways are at the heart of the strategy: «Open Fiber is building the future, because optical fiber is the enabling factor for applications and services. It is the DNA of a company that was born to be the nervous system of the country, which needs a quality and pervasive infrastructure. Today we are wiring cities, small towns and industrial zones. Tomorrow we will go on roads, motorways, ports», confirms Rossetti. An opportunity that the port of Trieste intends to seize, as underlined by the president of the Port Authority Zeno D’Agostino: «We need to look beyond the pure dimensional growth of traffic, to seize all the opportunities represented, for example, by the specificity of Trieste as a capital research and physics”. In a region which, the governor Massimiliano Fedriga recalled, “has tripled the presence of foreign investments in just a few years”. An example is the establishment of Bat (British American Tobacco) Italia in Trieste, an investment of five hundred million euros in five years, “thanks to the possibility of having a constructive relationship between the various institutional levels, the continuous sharing of know-how and the proactive collaboration between the public and private sectors», underlined the vice president Andrea di Paolo. The investment in NordEst was announced in September 2021, and the first production line is already active.

Friuli VG confirms itself as «a territory where innovation and digital technologies, from our observatory, go hand in hand – is the analysis by Alessandro Magnino of Vodafone Business – We have invested in the development of the mobile network precisely to ensure greater coverage and optimization of the network itself to manage data traffic that has doubled from before the pandemic to today. With FWA5G – a fiber-radio hybrid system – we have brought ultra-broadband to 48 small municipalities, reducing the digital distance that still characterizes some areas ‘far’ from big cities. In Trieste and throughout the region we will continue to invest to ensure rapid deployment of 5G to respond to the strong interest in advanced digital applications such as MPNs or mobile private networks, Cloud computing solutions for manufacturing, Big Data solutions to support tourism policies or solutions related to health and telemedicine”.

A common criticality is that of the lack of human resources: «The lack of manpower is a problem that affects development plans, especially in the northern regions – explains Rossetti – Today Open Fiber employs 8-9 thousand people, we are looking for another 4- 5,000 to be worked on construction sites. It is not easy because together with the other companies active in the PNRR we compete to find human resources, and this factor puts the completion of the plans by 2026 at risk”.