1 · Country Overview
Italy is one of Europe’s largest economies and has a rapidly modernizing broadband infrastructure. Fibre deployment has accelerated significantly in recent years, although connectivity remains uneven between regions, urban areas and rural communities.
FTTH household coverage in 2024
Top 5 cities by population
| City | Population (approx.) | Connectivity note |
|---|
| Rome | ~2.75M | National capital and major government, business and technology hub |
| Milan | ~1.37M | Italy’s largest commercial and financial centre |
| Naples | ~0.91M | Major southern metropolitan and business centre |
| Turin | ~0.85M | Technology, manufacturing and automotive hub |
| Palermo | ~0.63M | Major Sicilian business and regional centre |
Figures are approximate and pending verification against current census / Destatis data.
2 · Broadband & Mobile Speeds
According to Ookla figures compiled by DataReportal, at the end of 2025 Italy had a median fixed internet download speed of 96.32 Mbps and a median mobile download speed of 85.39 Mbps. Fixed download speed increased 22.5% over the preceding year, while median mobile download speed increased 59.7%.
Median fixed download speed
Median mobile download speed
Share of fixed accesses using FTTH at the end of 2025
- Rapid fibre expansion:FTTH connections grew 19.6% year over year by December 2025, according to AGCOM.
- FTTH is replacing older technologies: Copper lines continue to decline, while FTTC is also gradually losing share as households migrate to full fibre.
- Gigabit connections are becoming more common: The proportion of fixed lines marketed at 1 Gbit/s or higher increased from 12.6% in December 2021 to 35.9% in December 2025.
- High-speed access is increasingly widespread: The share of lines marketed at 100 Mbps or more increased from 61.7% in December 2021 to 83.9% in December 2025.
- Mobile connectivity continues to improve: Italy’s mobile market is heavily used for data, with more than 110 million active SIMs, including human and machine-to-machine connections, at the end of 2025.
National coverage statistics can hide differences between densely populated northern and central areas and parts of southern Italy and rural areas.
3 · Major Internet Providers
Italy has a highly competitive broadband market with several major national operators and infrastructure providers.
At the end of 2025, AGCOM reported TIM as the largest broadband/ultrabroadband operator with 32.7% of accesses, followed by Fastweb+Vodafone at 29.6% and Wind Tre at 14.6%. Other significant providers included Sky Italia, Eolo, Tiscali and Iliad.
| Provider | Technology | Approx. market position | Notes for remote workers |
|---|
| TIM | FTTH, FTTC, mobile | Largest broadband operator | Extensive nationwide network and major fibre footprint |
| Fastweb + Vodafone | FTTH, FWA, mobile | Major fixed and mobile operator | Large fibre customer base and strong enterprise presence |
| Wind Tre | FTTH, FTTC, FWA, mobile | Major national operator | Broad consumer and mobile footprint |
| Iliad | FTTH, mobile | Growing challenger | Rapidly expanding fixed and mobile presence |
| Sky Italia | FTTH / wholesale broadband | Significant alternative provider | Broadband services delivered using partner infrastructure |
| Eolo | FWA | Major fixed-wireless provider | Particularly relevant where fixed fibre access is limited |
Italy’s telecom market has also been undergoing consolidation. Fastweb completed its acquisition of Vodafone Italy at the end of 2024, creating the Fastweb+Vodafone combination reflected in AGCOM’s 2025 market statistics.
Users in Italy on VPN struggling with slow apps?
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4 · VPN Performance Challenges in Italy
Italy’s broadband infrastructure is improving rapidly, but a fast broadband connection does not automatically guarantee fast application performance.
For hybrid workers in Italy, VPN and remote-access performance can be affected by several factors:
Latency and routing
A VPN can introduce additional network hops between an employee, the corporate VPN gateway and the application they are accessing.
Packet loss and retransmission
Packet loss can have a disproportionate effect on application performance.
VPN encryption overhead
Traditional VPN architectures can add encryption, inspection and processing overhead to business traffic.
Backhauled traffic paths
Italian organizations with centralized VPN infrastructure may force remote users to send traffic through a corporate gateway before reaching cloud applications.
The result is a gap between the access speed advertised by an ISP and the performance users actually experience inside business applications.
5 · How Cloudbrink Helps
Cloudbrink’s high-performance ZTNA approach is designed to address the difference between raw last-mile bandwidth and the performance users experience when accessing business applications.
Rather than relying exclusively on centralized VPN concentrators, Cloudbrink uses software-defined FAST edges and optimized connectivity to bring secure access closer to users and applications.
faster application performance in lossy last-mile conditions
Preemptive correction designed to reduce the performance impact of packet loss
Designed to maintain sessions as users move between Wi-Fi and cellular networks
For Italian enterprises with hybrid workforces using fibre, FTTC, FWA and mobile connectivity, Cloudbrink can help close the gap between the broadband speed employees pay for and the application performance they actually experience.
See Cloudbrink on your own network in Italy
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