Vitrociset

8 July 2009

Last Friday, 3 July, in a hot summer day in Venice, the mayor Massimo Cacciari and his deputy Michele Vianello met journalists, technical partners and sponsors on a vessel sailing in the Canal Grande during the kick-off meeting of “Cittadinanza Digitale” (the “digital citizenry” initiative).

The idea of the Venetian local administration was to provide connectivity to Venetian residents, the millions of tourists visiting the lagoon city every year and workers, for them to access the services to be made available in the next few years and months by hundreds of hot spots located in the most strategic sites and squares of the city, and by an additional capacity consisting in hundreds of  kilometres of fibre lines. Hot spots will be simply accessible by entering a password.

The project was awarded to the new Institutional Customers Department of Vitrociset in the context of a public bidding procedure organised by Venis, Venezia Informatica e Sistemi S.p.A. For both Venice and Vitrociset, the initiative is innovative in Italy because no WIFI network exists in this Country with a comparable degree of extension; it is also unprecedented at world level, as no mixed (cable + WIFI) network exists of such size and for the purpose stated above.

After the customary welcome and thanksgiving address to participants, in which a few words were also spent in praise of Vitrociset, Mr. Cacciari and Mr. Vianello declared that digitalising the city was a great challenge and a demanding commitment.

More specifically, the Mayor emphasised that the idea of Cittadinanza Digitale proposed by Mr. Vianello, in which he had believed since the beginning, would only prove to be a success and produce the expected effects if such modernisation process was fully followed up equally by the other stakeholders of the community, each within their scope of activity and possibilities.

Mr. Lorenzo D’Onghia, Vitrociset’s General Manager, in turn, observed: “Our company is proud to have participated in the implementation of the  Cittadinanza Digitale project and thus to have associated its name with Venice, a city which is now among the leading cities worldwide and the first in Italy to be equipped with such infrastructure – the project, in particular, places Vitrociset among the leading Italian companies active in the ICT sector.

All this, continued Mr. D’Onghia in his message, was made possible through the recent extension of our core business with the acquisition of Eda on 26 June”.

By the end of the year, the ambitious project of the deputy mayor Vianello is to provide internet coverage to the full city of Venice and Mestre (the mainland Venice district).