Enel CEO offers cheap option for Italian broadband plan

PARIS, May 21 (Reuters) - Using the infrastructure of Enel to bring fibre-optic telecom cables to millions of Italian homes would cost up to 3 billion euros ($3.34 billion), a fifth of current official estimates, the head of the utility said on Thursday.

Prime minister Matteo Renzi has made rolling out a nationwide fibre-optic network one of his government's priorities to help modernise Italy's laggard economy.

Enel (Milan: ENEL.MI - news) , Italy's biggest power utility, will deploy new smart metres to 33 million households over the next four years and is ready to allow the pipes it uses to connect these metres to host telecom cables.

"While we are visiting these homes, the same people that will shut the power off and take the old meter out ... can also put in fibre optic cables into the pipe going out to our cabin," Francesco Starace told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in Paris.

Starace said Enel did not intend to become a telecoms operator but would charge a yearly maintenance fee of "hundreds of millions of euros". ($1 = 0.8984 euros) (Reporting by Geert De Clercq, Writing by Stephen Jewkes and Danilo Masoni; editing by Agnieszka Flak)