I’ll explain the flop of the Infratel announcement

12 January 20222 years ago babelfish

Here is the lesson to be learned from the flop of the Infratel tender on the smaller islands. The intervention of Dario Denni, founder of Europio Consulting

Today we will travel with our minds in the most beautiful places in Italy: we will fly to Pantelleria and Carloforte between the scent of capers and the taste of tuna and passito. And we will discover why the government's plan to forcibly digitize the smaller islands with PNRR funds is an unacceptable bullying.

First of all it is true that these are islands, but they are not isolated lands. Quite simply, they are far from the industrial contamination of large metropolises and cities. And they are by no means "minor islands", if only one thinks that – on the contrary – Pantelleria is the fifth Italian island by territorial extension and Carloforte is the sixth. More properly, therefore, the term minor islands should refer to archipelagos when we want to identify the islands dimensionally smaller than a larger one.

These are therefore territories that are affected by a digital divide because they often escape the turbulence of technological innovation and this – in some cases – can only be good for the protection of the natural oases that have spontaneously created over the years.

For example, north of Carloforte there are the tuna traps, the natural pools of Nasca and the cliffs where the queen's falcon nests. But in the middle there is also an eco-monster, with its concrete foundations implanted in the sand there is an abusive hotel right next to the beach of La Caletta.

All this great premise only serves to explain how absurd it is to spend the money from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan to connect the smaller islands to a turbocapitalist outlet that would like them to be different from what they are now.

Let's ask ourselves for a moment: What's more delusional than wanting to bring the optical fiber at all costs into a dammuso immersed in a lava flow of Pantelleria, in an uncertain location between Sesi and Scauri?

The real distinguishing factor of those territories is the right condition of isolation from the extreme and pervasive digitization we are used to.

It will therefore come as no surprise that the tender for the smaller islands launched by Infratel last December went deserted. The realization of the optical backhaul and the laying of submarine optical cables is a job that few in Italy know how to do and that involves insane costs for unsustainable investments, even if subsidized by the state.

In the face of a decidedly unattractive call drawn up by Infratel, above all due to the particularly onerous surety, criminal and insurance clauses, a fundamental context factor must be added. In fact, the sector is short of 10,000 specialized workers for the development of fiber optic infrastructures. It certainly has no resources to spend on loss-making investments.

The problem is probably upstream, namely having considered the smaller islands as an extraterritorial territory with respect to the Region to which they belong. At this point it is necessary to make a clarification: Carloforte is not a Genoese enclave within the Sardinia Region just as Pantelleria is not a Tunisian enclave within the Sicily Region.

Instead, it is a matter of regional territories in all respects, and an intervention that alienates the island context from the territorial body of reference is unthinkable. Suffice it to say that in Pantelleria there is no hospital and for every need a helicopter gets up from Trapani to go to help any Pantelleria population in emergency. The region therefore deemed unnecessary a hospital in Pantelleria. Could the central government ever deem it necessary to have a hospital in Pantelleria if the local health authority does not see an intervention other than the helicopter bridge from the nearest assistance center necessary and sustainable?

Likewise, we should ask ourselves whether the Sicily region was consulted or how it was involved before issuing a tender to develop a submarine cable from Trapani to Pantelleria, then from Pantelleria to Lampedusa and from Lampedusa to Linosa.

The lesson that can therefore be learned from the flop of the Infratel tender on the minor islands is precisely this: the PNRR must give a leading role to local territorial bodies whether it is to spend 60 million euros as in the "minor islands" tender or if it is a question of spending 7 billion for the Italy 1 gig and Italy 5G plan.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/isole-minori-bando-infratel-flop/ on Wed, 12 Jan 2022 11:12:36 +0000.