Enel CEO offers cheaper option for Italian broadband plan

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By Geert De Clercq

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 ($3.3 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 around 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.

"What we are proposing is to give the opportunity to ... use our pipelines, do not destroy walls, do not break everything, just use that. This will reduce the cost of fibre cable laying by a factor of five," Starace added.

Starace said Enel, which has already been working with telecoms companies to help them lay cables, did not intend to become a telecoms operator but would charge a yearly maintenance fee of hundreds of millions of euros.

He said the fibre cables would be owned by telecoms operators which would have to connect them to their networks passing through Enel's 1 million street cabinets.

Starace, who has been in charge of the state-controlled utility since May last year, said however the project was still in early days. "This is just a concept now and we really have to go in depth."

Telecom Italia CEO Marco Patuano said on Wednesday the former phone monopoly was interested in cooperating with Enel or other smaller Italian utilities in rolling out superfast networks. ($1 = 0.8984 euros) (Writing by Stephen Jewkes and Danilo Masoni; Editing by David Holmes)