A fibre nation that retails nothing

On 1 July 2024, Telecom Italia completed the sale of its fixed network — ducts, cabinets, copper, fibre and nearly twenty thousand employees — to a consortium led by KKR, at an enterprise value of 18.8 billion euros, rising toward 22 billion with earn-outs. The buyer, FiberCop, sells access to operators and only to operators. The other national fibre builder, Open Fiber, was born that way: a wholesale company describing its own model as open access on equal terms for every operator, owned 60 per cent by the state investor CDP Equity and 40 per cent by Macquarie. Between them, the two firms own most of the paths a bit can take into an Italian building, and neither will ever send a household a bill.

This is a genuinely odd industrial structure, and it is easy to misread. The commentary treats it as a story about giants — about KKR's returns, CDP's mandates, the endlessly renegotiated single-network merger. But a network that retails nothing has delegated its entire commercial surface to other people. Roughly speaking, Italy has split its fixed-line industry into a capital-intensive lower half that owns glass and a labour-intensive upper half that owns customers. The lower half is two companies. The upper half is thousands, most of them small, local and invisible to the national press.

This essay is about one of the invisible ones. TSNET is the routing name, the domain and the working brand of Tecnoservizi S.r.l., a business connectivity and IT-services firm on Via Chiesa Sud in Rovereto sulla Secchia, a village in the comune of Novi di Modena, on the flat farmland north of Modena. The name sets a small trap worth disarming immediately: TS is the vehicle-plate code for Trieste, and a reader scanning Italian network records might place a firm called TSNET on the Adriatic border. Every register says otherwise. The TS is Tecnoservizi, and the company's world is the low Modena plain — knitwear factories, ceramics groups, biomedical suppliers and small-town administrations — two hundred kilometres west of the port the name seems to promise.

The reason TSNET repays attention is not scale. It is that the firm's entire commercial existence is a controlled experiment in the question the wholesale nation poses: when the glass is rented on published, regulated terms available to everyone, what exactly does a local operator sell, and what is it worth? For TSNET the answer is measurable, because the input side of its business is published in wholesale tariff tables and the output side surfaces in a regional public-tariff scheme it participates in. Between those two published numbers sits the service layer — and the rest of this essay walks through it.

Four registers, one village company

Identity first, because in this corner of the market names are slippery. The domain tsnet.it was registered on 14 March 1997 and is held today by Tecnoservizi S.r.l. of Rovereto sulla Secchia; the whois record still carries an administrative contact created in 2000 under the earlier legal form "Tecnoservizi S.a.s.", a trace of the partnership that preceded the limited company, which also survives in old chamber directory listings. The company's own site states the essentials in the footer: VAT number 02356320362, share capital of 10,000 euros fully paid, REA Modena 284414.

The regulator agrees. A query of AGCOM's public register of communications operators returns TECNOSERVIZI SRL, fiscal code 02356320362, registration number 18038, entered on 2 March 2009 for "servizio di comunicazione elettronica", seat at Via Chiesa Sud 134, Novi di Modena, with no cessation date. The same query illustrates why care is needed: it also returns a wholly unrelated "Tecnoservizi S.a.s." in Reggio Calabria, an advertising concessionaire whose registration ceased in 2021. The name is common. An IT consultancy at tsnet.biz shares the acronym too; on the day of writing that site refused connections entirely, which is its own small data point about how thin some of these namesakes run.

The numbering registries complete the picture and add dates the company itself does not advertise. RIPE records show an organisation object for Tecnoservizi S.r.l. carrying the same company number 02356320362 — a clean three-way reconciliation between corporate registry, telecom regulator and numbering registry — upgraded to full local internet registry membership on 4 May 2022. Its network, AS62290, was created in November 2013 under the as-name TSNET and today originates four address blocks amounting to roughly 2,560 IPv4 addresses. The firm is also an accredited registrar for .it domains under the code TSNET-REG. For a company whose registered capital would not buy a used van, the registry footprint is remarkably complete: domain registrar, address-space holder, autonomous network, licensed operator.

Two attempts at deeper corporate records should be stated plainly. The Registro Imprese company extract — the primary filing document — sits behind the chambers-of-commerce paywall and was not purchased for this piece. The most detailed free republisher of chamber data, ufficiocamerale.it, blocked automated retrieval outright during research; its search summary, before blocking, showed 2022 revenue in the 600,000–1,500,000 euro band, up 4 per cent on 2021. Two other chamber-data republishers were reachable: one reports 2023 turnover of about 1.35 million euros, and another confirms the company as an active limited company in the same revenue band, noting a decline of about 7 per cent between 2022 and 2024. These are aggregators republishing filed accounts, not the filings themselves; the figures are used below with that flag attached. The aggregators even disagree on the firm's statistical classification — one lists a manufacturing code, the other the code for internet access provision — a reminder that ATECO labels on small diversified firms describe history as much as activity.

So the identity resolves cleanly: one company, one fiscal code, four independent registers, a working brand that happens to collide with a border city's initials, and a paywall standing where the balance sheet should be.

From knitwear dial-up to a corner of the routing table

The company's own history is legible in archives most firms never think about. Tecnoservizi's corporate presentation dates its founding to 1996 and calls itself an internet service provider "dagli albori di Internet in Italia" — from Italian internet's dawn. The Wayback Machine backs the boast: a January 1998 capture of tsnet.it announces "Tecnoservizi — Internet Service Provider di Rovereto s/S (MO)", counts visitors since February 1997, and declares the firm a partner of ITnet, then one of Italy's national backbones, itself a member of PIPEX International. The customer links on that 1998 page are the district economy in miniature: Maglificio Nico's and Maglificio Tattica, knitwear mills in the same village; firms in Carpi, the textile capital next door; a company in Mirandola, the biomedical town up the road. A village ISP, upstairs from the loom sheds, reselling a national carrier's transit to factories that suddenly needed email.

The next two decades are a study in patient accretion. Ministry authorisations arrived in 2007 and 2008 for construction and installation registries, and in 2009 the firm took both its telephony reseller authorisation and its AGCOM operator registration — the moment it formally became an operator rather than a customer with a rack. In November 2013 it acquired its own network number; in May 2022 it became a full RIPE member in its own right; in June 2022 it appeared on PeeringDB, and today it holds a 10-gigabit port at the Bologna node of the Milan exchange fabric and a 1-gigabit peering in Rome, with a listed presence at a Bologna interconnection facility. Its transit comes not from a global carrier's Milan sales office but from Cesena Net, a Romagna operator two provinces east, alongside the international carrier RETN; its older routing policy still names Telecom Italia Sparkle and Retelit, the upstreams of earlier eras. Small operators wear their supplier history in public like tree rings.

One date in the middle of that timeline carries more weight locally than any registry can express. On 29 May 2012, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake with its epicentre at Medolla struck the low plain; in Rovereto sulla Secchia the parish church a few hundred metres from Via Chiesa Sud collapsed and killed the village priest. The quake flattened warehouses and factory sheds across exactly the industrial districts that populate TSNET's customer lists — and the reconstruction decade that followed, with its rebuilt plants, new municipal systems and public Wi-Fi projects (the firm's presentation lists the NOVIWIFI network among its references), is the demand backdrop against which the company's slow infrastructure upgrades make sense. It is hard to find a cleaner example of an ISP whose fortunes are welded to a single small territory's, down to the seismology.

What the history adds up to is a specific business type: not a network builder, not a pure reseller, but an integrator that gradually acquired every credential needed to stop depending on anyone else's paperwork — its own addresses, its own routing, its own registrar accreditation, its own operator registration — while continuing to rent every metre of access line it sells. That is precisely the shape the wholesale nation rewards, and the price lists show why.

What the rented glass costs

The input side of TSNET's business is published, because the platforms beneath it are either regulated, state-aided or publicly owned. The numbers are worth setting out with some care, since everything else in this piece rests on them. All figures that follow are list prices from published wholesale tariff documents, stated as such; no confidential discount schedules are visible from outside, and none are assumed.

Start with Open Fiber's concession network in the "white areas" — the thinly served countryside where the state paid for the glass and Open Fiber operates it. The current white-area price list, dated 17 December 2025, offers an operator a best-effort FTTH access — any consumer profile from 100 megabits to 2.5 gigabits — for 16.00 euros per month, plus a 43.78 euro activation and a one-off 110 euro first-connection charge. The same document prices the business-grade product, GPON Business Access, with committed bandwidth: a 30-megabit guaranteed profile costs 50 euros per month on a 24-month term, or 40 euros on a 60-month term; 60 megabits guaranteed runs 75 or 65 euros; 77 megabits, 96.69 or 95 euros; high-availability options add 70 per cent. To collect the traffic at all, the operator needs a delivery kit at the handoff node — 150 euros per month for a gigabit interface, 300 for ten gigabits — plus colocation and backhaul from whichever node its customers hang off.

The same list also prices the make-or-buy decision that defines a small operator's ambitions. A fully passive end-to-end fibre — bare glass from the customer's wall to the exchange, with the operator supplying every piece of electronics itself — costs 10.80 euros per month. Renting the lit, managed version of the same path costs 16. The five-euro difference is what Open Fiber charges for owning and running the access electronics; undercutting it requires the operator to buy, power, spare and monitor optical line terminals across every exchange area it serves. For a village firm with a handful of customers behind any given node, the arithmetic almost always says rent — which is precisely how the wholesale nation keeps its smallest tenants asset-light and its own utilisation high. TSNET's registry record, all services and no duct permits, says the firm did that arithmetic long ago.

Read the main table twice and the wholesale nation's central price signal falls out of it. A gigabit of best effort is 16 euros; 30 guaranteed megabits — one thirty-third of the headline speed — is 50. On the same network, from the same document, the guarantee is worth three times the gigabit. Bandwidth is abundant and cheap; commitment is scarce and expensive. Every euro of TSNET's margin lives somewhere in that spread, because what a knitwear factory's ERP link or a clinic's imaging transfer buys is not speed but the promise that the speed is there at 11 a.m. on invoice day — and someone local to shout at when it is not.

The newer state-aided build matters even more to this particular firm, because it reaches its home town. In the PNRR-funded "Italia a 1 Giga" plan, Open Fiber announced works in Novi di Modena on 10 June 2023 to connect more than 1,650 street addresses with FTTH — 70 per cent public money, 30 per cent Open Fiber's. On the wholesale list for those areas, dated 30 June 2025, an active line at 1 gigabit down and 300 megabits up costs an operator 13.00 euros per month with a 69.76 euro activation; ten gigabits symmetric, 95 euros. Thirteen euros a month, at list, for a gigabit into a farmhouse or a workshop that four years ago had rural DSL: that is the floor under every connectivity price in the district, and it was set by tender, not by a market.

FiberCop, the other platform, is present in TSNET's world mostly as the legacy copper and FTTC network that carried its DSL resale years, and as the second state-aid builder. Its wholesale terms in the subsidised areas went through a regulator's mangle worth noting: AGCOM's decision 507/24/CONS of 18 December 2024 records small operators complaining that FiberCop wanted a 1,700 euro one-off contribution per cabinet area to unlock passive access in the plan's zones, and the authority circumscribing when that charge may be applied. The episode is minor in the national accounts and existential at village scale — 1,700 euros per cabinet is noise to a carrier with millions of lines and a wall to a firm connecting a dozen customers behind that cabinet.

The third platform is the strangest and the most local: the regional government's own company. Lepida, owned by Emilia-Romagna and its municipalities, builds fibre into industrial estates under a 2014 regional law and then invites operators, through published expressions of interest, to sell services on it — at end-user rates fixed in advance for the whole region: 103 euros per month for 10 megabits symmetric, 206 for 30, 410 for 100, 823 for 300, 1,646 euros per month for a symmetric gigabit, all plus VAT. Tecnoservizi is a taker: when Lepida lit the industrial area of Gaggio Montano in the Bologna Apennines in 2019, eleven operators answered the call, and Tecnoservizi stands in the list alongside Cesena Net — its own transit supplier — Acantho and eight others. The regional state does not merely rent this firm its inputs; it also, in one segment, prints its price card.

The arithmetic of the service layer

Assemble the pieces and the unit economics of a wholesale-nation specialist stop being abstract. What follows distinguishes, deliberately, between figures that are evidence and figures that are inference.

The evidence. On the input side: 13 to 16 euros per month, at list, for a best-effort FTTH access; 40 to 50 euros for a 30-megabit guaranteed business access; 96.69 euros for the top guaranteed profile; 150 to 300 euros per month per delivery kit; activation charges between 43.78 and 132.28 euros per line — all from Open Fiber's published tariff tables cited above. On the output side, one published, regionally fixed retail card in the segment closest to TSNET's book: 206 euros per month for 30 symmetric megabits to a business, 410 for 100, under the Lepida industrial-area scheme. And one company-level number: turnover of roughly 1.35 million euros in 2023, per a chamber-data republisher of the filed accounts, sitting inside the 0.6–1.5 million band that two other republishers report for adjacent years — flagged again as aggregator-carried rather than read from the filing itself.

The inference. Take the 30-megabit guaranteed business line as the unit. At Lepida's fixed 206 euros retail and Open Fiber's 40–50 euro guaranteed input — list prices both, from the same region and the same season — the connectivity layer alone leaves roughly 155 to 165 euros per line per month before the operator's own costs. Those costs are lumpy rather than proportional: a 300-euro ten-gigabit delivery kit, IX ports and two transit contracts are shared across the whole customer base, while truck rolls, on-call engineers and the firm's 24/7 monitoring promises scale with heads, not lines. That is why the gross spread has to be wide: the service layer is where all the labour lives. A plausible blended monthly bill per business customer — connectivity plus voice, mail, hosted services and a support contract, the bundle the firm has sold in some form since 1998 — runs in the low-to-mid hundreds of euros. Setting that against filed turnover: at 250 euros per month blended, 1.35 million euros of revenue is about 450 paying business relationships; at 350 euros, about 320; at 150, about 750. Each figure is consistent with the observable scaffolding — four address blocks totalling some 2,560 IPv4 addresses, a single 10-gigabit public peering port, two transit providers, one downstream network — which would be over-built for 50 customers and hopelessly thin for 5,000. Triangulated the other way, from infrastructure to revenue: a firm with this routing footprint and a published support-heavy service card would be expected to turn over between one and two million euros; the filed 1.35 million lands inside that band. Two independent methods, one from accounts and one from infrastructure, agree on the order of magnitude, and neither supports anything grander.

Two smaller revenue layers deserve their own line in the ledger, because they explain the firm's resilience better than connectivity does. The first is voice: since the 2009 reseller authorisation, TSNET has ported numbers, sold VoIP trunks and billed calls — recurring revenue that rides the same access lines at near-zero marginal network cost and dies only when the customer dies. The second is what might be called custody revenue: domain registrations through its own registrar accreditation, certified PEC mailboxes, hosting on its own address space, backup and monitoring contracts. Custody products are individually tiny — tens of euros a month — but they are the products that make leaving painful, and they cushion exactly the years when connectivity pricing sags. The cost base against all of it is dominated by people: engineers who drive to factories, answer the out-of-hours phone and hold the certifications the firm has advertised since its Cisco partnership began in 1998. Transit and ports, the costs outsiders fixate on, are a rounding item by comparison — a ten-gigabit exchange port and two regional transit contracts together cost less per month than one competent systems engineer.

There is also a quiet balance-sheet footnote the registers reveal: those 2,560 IPv4 addresses. On any of the per-address prices the transfer market has printed in recent years, the firm's holdings would fetch a comfortable multiple of its 10,000 euros of registered capital — a reminder that a thirty-year-old ISP's most liquid asset can be the numbers it was handed in a different internet. That observation is context, not a valuation; the blocks are in active use carrying the business.

What the arithmetic cannot show is profit, and the honest reading is that the spread is fatter than the bottom line. The 2024 revenue dip of about 7 per cent that one aggregator reports, and the company's own notice raising its technical-assistance rates — unchanged "for years", it says, despite inflation, energy costs and the compliance burden of privacy rules and the NIS2 security directive — read together as a service business whose costs caught up with a price card built in a cheaper decade. Raising support tariffs is the classic move of a firm whose margin lives in labour rather than lines; it is also a live test of how much pricing power three decades of switching costs actually bought.

Customers who pay for guarantees, not gigabits

Who is on the other side of these invoices? The company's presentation names its references, and they map the district economy with almost official precision: the Italian arm of a global labels group, a ceramics group from the Sassuolo belt, knitwear producers from the Carpi district (one of them literally in the village), a private security institute, medical clinics, cooperatives, the municipality of Novi di Modena itself. The 1998 archive page and the 2014 reference list bracket sixteen years of the same clientele; the continuity is the point. These are firms that bought terminal emulation to IBM midrange systems from Tecnoservizi in one decade, LAN cabling in the next, virtualisation after that, and now buy guaranteed fibre, hosted voice and a security perimeter — from the same phone number.

The public sector thread runs through the whole record. The municipality of Novi di Modena appears in the reference list for terminal-server work; the NOVIWIFI public network appears under the firm's own name; and the Lepida seller lists put the company inside the region's institutional connectivity machinery. For a business of this size, public customers are double-edged: they pay slowly and procure formally, but they anchor local legitimacy and they rarely churn. No tender award naming the firm surfaced in the procurement portals searched for this piece — village-scale supply arrangements typically sit below the visibility thresholds of national contract registers — so the depth of the public book is one of the genuine unknowns here, stated as such rather than guessed at.

The dependency runs deeper than habit, and it is visible in the routing table. GMT Components, a telephony-and-systems integrator across the river in Reggiolo — incorporated, the record notes with grim local irony, in the very week of the 2012 earthquakes — operates its own small network whose only connection to the internet is TSNET. A neighbouring integrator chose to build its business entirely behind this one's network. Single-homing is the strongest customer-loyalty signal a routing table can express, and the strongest concentration risk: for GMT, TSNET is not a supplier but a utility.

Switching costs in this segment are structural rather than contractual. A business that takes connectivity alone can migrate in an afternoon under Italy's regulated donor-recipient procedures — the wholesale lists even price the migration at a few tens of euros. A business whose mail, certified PEC mailboxes, domains, VoIP numbering, firewalls, backups and monitoring all terminate at the same small operator cannot migrate at all without a project. TSNET's registrar accreditation and its address space make it the registrant, the resolver and the route for its customers at once. That bundle is the real product; the fibre underneath is, by national design, a commodity anyone can rent at the same published price.

Which is also why the competitive threat is not another village ISP. It is the segmentation choice of the big retail brands riding the same platforms — whether TIM, Vodafone, Fastweb and Wind Tre find it worth deploying sales effort against sub-500-employee firms in the low plain — and the slow upward creep of what "good enough" best-effort service means. Every year the 13-euro gigabit gets more reliable, the case for the 50-euro guaranteed input narrows, and the service layer must justify itself on operations rather than on scarcity. The counter-argument is the one the tariff tables make: as long as a guarantee wholesales at three times a gigabit, the market itself keeps pricing exactly the thing small integrators sell.

Signals in the margins of the record

Beyond the filings and price lists, the softer traces mostly corroborate, and occasionally complicate, the picture.

The freshest is a numbering-registry object created on 5 January 2026: a contact record for "TecnoServizi srl" at an address in Modena's university district, maintained not by the company but by Lepida's registry account. Registry objects created under the regional network company's maintainer, days into 2026, suggest an active assignment or interconnection between the two — consistent with the firm's role selling on Lepida's industrial fibre, possibly pointing at hosted infrastructure in a regional facility (Lepida's own Modena data centre opened in 2020, though at a different address). What would settle it is a Lepida assignment list or an announcement neither party has published; until then it stands as evidence that the relationship with the regional platform is current, not archival.

The public-exchange records tell a similar story of quiet, recent investment: the firm's PeeringDB entries were updated as recently as March 2026, and the ten-gigabit Bologna port is the kind of capacity a sub-two-million-euro operator buys only if traffic — or ambition — requires it. Its secondary name server sits off-net in a British hosting provider's space, small evidence of disaster-recovery thinking from a company whose village lost its church tower to an earthquake.

Even the firm's name servers carry a signal. They are called homer, delta and omicron, they live in the company's own address space, and the primary pair has answered from the same block for years — the naming whimsy of engineers who built their own plumbing in the nineties and never saw a reason to outsource it. Plenty of larger operators quietly moved their DNS, mail and hosting onto hyperscale platforms over the past decade; this one still runs its own, which costs real engineer-hours and buys real independence. Whether that is prudence or sentiment, it is consistent with everything else in the record: a firm that treats self-reliance as the product.

Reputation signals are dominated by noise, and the noise is itself informative. Employee-review sites return ratings for "Tecnoservizi Srl" that turn out, on inspection, to belong to unrelated cleaning and multi-services firms in Lombardy, Tuscany and the Veneto; the Modena ISP has no visible employee chatter of its own, no Glassdoor trail, no recruitment drumbeat beyond a stable local advertisement for technical staff. For a thirty-person-or-smaller firm in a village labour market, silence is the expected reading — but it also means the outside world has no independent window on the company's staffing health, and staffing is the whole cost base. The absence of any published customer price list points the same way: this is a firm that sells by visit and quotation, in dialect, not by web funnel. Nothing in forums, outage trackers or local press suggests service trouble; nothing proves its absence either. The signal that would matter most — a drift of flagship district customers toward national brands — would show up first in the references page quietly shortening, and it has not.

The reorganisation above, and the ground shifting below

The risks to this business divide cleanly into what happens above it, in the wholesale stack, and what happens below it, in the district.

Above, the wholesale nation keeps reorganising itself. The FiberCop transaction embedded an earn-out of up to 2.5 billion euros tied to a possible combination with Open Fiber, and through 2025 and 2026 the owners have circled that outcome: CDP Equity, Macquarie and Open Fiber publicly pledged cooperation with the government's national-network project, while reported negotiations have oscillated between full merger and a commercial agreement to rescue the PNRR build, with KKR reportedly conditioning any merger on Brussels' blessing and an Open Fiber recapitalisation. For a firm like TSNET the merger question is not corporate theatre; it decides how many wholesale counterparties, price lists and technical interfaces its little book must straddle. Consolidation would simplify operations and concentrate pricing power in a single landlord; continued fragmentation keeps arbitrage alive and keeps four sets of ordering systems on the engineers' desks. Neither outcome is safe, and the firm controls neither. What can be said from the record is that regulated and tendered price floors — the 13-euro gigabit, the approved lists — have so far ratcheted downward, which compresses the resale layer and pushes value further into labour, exactly where a local firm is strongest and a national brand weakest.

The subtler upstream risk is administrative. The 507/24 episode — a 1,700 euro charge appearing between an operator and a subsidised cabinet until the regulator intervened — shows how the wholesale nation's frictions land on its smallest tenants. Every reorganisation of FiberCop's and Open Fiber's offer documents, every migration procedure rewritten, is a fixed compliance cost spread over TSNET's few hundred lines rather than a carrier's millions. The wholesale-only model was designed to neutralise discrimination by ownership; it cannot neutralise the regressive economics of paperwork.

Below, the district itself is the exposure. The customer base is the low plain's export economy — textiles, ceramics, biomedical, machinery — plus its town halls. That base rebuilt impressively after 2012, but it is demographically thinning, consolidating into larger groups whose IT decisions migrate to headquarters procurement, and steadily more able to buy adequate connectivity from anyone. The single-owner risks are equally plain: a 10,000-euro-capital company whose domain contacts have carried the same family name since 2000 has key-person concentration that no registry can hedge, and a succession event would test whether the customer relationships belong to the firm or to its founders. None of this is imminent in the record; all of it is structural.

Set against those risks is the asset side the registers reveal: an operator registration seventeen years old, registrar accreditation, a routing identity with its own address space in a market where IPv4 still trades dear, membership of the regional platform's seller lists, and a customer bundle whose switching costs compound annually. The margin above rented glass is real, published, and defensible — but it is defended every morning with vans and phone calls, not with any moat a balance sheet would show.

What would change this judgement

The reading offered here — a durable, labour-bound service business earning a wide published spread on a narrowing territory — rests on documents that could be contradicted by better ones, and it is worth naming which.

A purchased Registro Imprese extract with full financial statements would replace the aggregator-carried turnover figure this piece leans on; if the filed accounts showed revenue materially outside the 0.6–1.5 million euro band, or losses persisting through the 2024 dip the republishers report, the portrait of comfortable spread-earning would need repainting. Publication by Lepida of current per-area operator lists would either confirm Tecnoservizi's continuing presence on the regional platform or reveal quiet exit; the January 2026 registry object argues for the former, but a list would settle it. A visible TSNET price card — the firm publishes none today — would let the retail side of the unit economics rest on its own tariffs rather than on the regional scheme's fixed card, and any observed transaction price from a municipal tender award naming the firm would be better still; none surfaced in the procurement records searched for this piece, an absence stated here rather than papered over. On the wholesale side, the next revisions of Open Fiber's two price lists will show whether the guarantee premium — the 50-versus-16 spread that anchors this essay — holds, compresses or widens; a collapse in that ratio would do more damage to the thesis than any corporate event in Milan. And the single-network question itself: a completed FiberCop–Open Fiber combination with published successor tariffs would convert this piece's structural speculation into arithmetic, one way or the other. Finally, the human variables — a succession announcement, a sale of the firm, an exodus of named district customers — would each outweigh a great deal of registry archaeology.

Evidence register