Its CEO Corrado Sciolla told a press conference yesterday that it had tried for several months and failed to cut a deal with one of the existing mobile operators (TIM, Vodafone, Wind, and 3) to become an enhanced senior provider. As a result of that failure, he said it now intends to file a complaint with the country’s antitrust authority because the current market is in an oligopoly situation.
There is no legislation in place regarding MVNOs in Italy, but BT clearly feels it can provoke the authorities into creating the legal entity. The move mirrors what is going on in Spain where the regulator has already told the country’s three mobile operators to entertain proposals for MVNO operators on their networks, and BT is known to have registered its interest in such a deal.
BT is an MVNO in the UK on the Vodafone network, and given its development of fixed-mobile convergence offerings both for the consumer and enterprise markets, as well as remote and mobile access services for corporate travelers around the globe, it is interested in replicating this in other geographies.
