1. Tell us a little bit about EOLO as a company…
EOLO is an Italian telecommunications operator offering ultra-wideband connectivity services in wireless and wired technology, for the residential and business segments.
The company's mission is - clear since the beginnings: bring the Internet where others do not arrive, positioning itself as an enabler of Digital Transformation throughout Italy, thanks to a proprietary technology (EWG) that allows providing bands up to 1 Ggbps on licensed frequencies at 26-28GHz, and thanks to the Fiber Optic network that allows you to serve its customers with FTTH connections up to 1Gbps in more than 80 cities.
EOLO has more than 500 employees, is planning to close the current FY at about 160 M€ of turnover and to continue the important investments of the last three years (300 M€) to complete the territorial coverage while maintaining its DNA strongly devoted to innovation. EOLO operates in over 6,000 Italian municipalities, and allows more than 1.2 million people and almost 10,000 companies to have high performance connectivity, thanks to a network of over 2,800 BTS (radio repeaters) and 10,000 km of fiber optic backbones.
2. What is the company’s main offering and how is it enhancing connectivity today?
Our offer includes services for different reference markets: RETAIL (consumer and business) and WHOLESALE. For the latter in particular, we have built a modular offer that allows you to give a timely response to every connectivity need, in FWA technology and FTTH fiber optic, wherever the end customer is, with particularly stringent SLAs.
Thanks to the presence of almost 2,000 certified partners for the installation and assurance phase, we are able to guarantee a delivery time of only 5 working days from the order and a response to our contact center, within 20 seconds from the request for support. Our proprietary wireless network is totally separated from the fiber optic network, so we are also able to provide our customers with the highest level of service availability on the market, an increasingly necessary element to be able to offer guarantees of Business Continuity.
3. Growth and innovation are values present in EOLO’s DNA, what projects (e.g. FTTH/FTTC) are you currently working on?
For several years now, the company has been committed to product innovation (particularly for wireless services, with the proprietary EWG technology launched in 2017) and to strengthening our customer support structure, both Retail and Wholesale, for all phases of the sales, delivery and assurance process. In order to support the wholesale market in the best possible way, last year we created a Business Unit consisting of a pre-sales and design (system engineer), project and service management structure, as well as a sales network. We have also launched an international wholesale sales channel, which is dedicated to international operators who need to serve their customers in Italy.
In the next two years we will be engaged in consolidating this Business Unit, completing our EWG wireless network coverage in southern Italy and expanding our coverage of fiber services, both FTTH (already marketed in 80 cities) and FTTC (available for the wholesale market from next year)
4. Sergio, you’ve worked at Telecom Italia, Edisontel, Albacom, BT Italia, and Infracom Italia, how has the carrier community changed over the years in your experience?
The carrier community has always felt the need to find a balance between the continuous pursuit of innovation and the sustainability of the investments needed to support such innovation. In the last 20 years this challenge has become more complicated, as market bandwidth requirements and technology disruption grow much faster than the investment capabilities of companies in the industry. For this reason, we have been living for some time now a necessary action of consolidation of a part of the TLC companies, which try in this way to put in common the investments in platforms and infrastructure, reducing the costs of implementation and management of the same.
Certainly this trend will continue and grow over the years, leading to some extent to an enhancement of disruptive realities, which have chosen technological solutions and innovative business models, as I think EOLO has done and is doing.
