Vodafone Italy

Vodafone Italia

Type	Private
Industry	Mobile telecommunications
Founded	1995 as Omnitel Pronto-Italia 2003 rebranded Vodafone Italia
Headquarters	Milan, Italy
Key people	Ian MacLaurin, Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth, Chairman (till July 2006) Paul Hazen, Deputy Chairman Arun Sarin, Chief Executive Paolo Bertoluzzo, CEO Italy
Products	Vodafone live!, Vodafone Mobile Connect, Vodafone WLAN, Vodafone live! with 3G, Vodafone Simply, Vodafone Passport etc
Website	www.vodafone.it

Vodafone Italia (former Omnitel Pronto- Italia) is an Italian mobile telephony operator. The company has 31,000,000 customers and a market share of 33.4%, placing it just behind TIM. Vodafone Italia is an owned subsidiary of Vodafone Group plc (76.86%) & Verizon (23.14%).

Network and coverage

Like other European operators, Vodafone Italia uses GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA technologies for its network. Vodafone Italia began to deploy EDGE on its network during summer 2011. As of December 30th, 2008, this was Vodafone Italia's coverage:

• GSM/GPRS: 99.7% of the population, 98% of the territory
• UMTS/HSDPA: > 85% of the population

History

In December 1995, Omnitel Pronto-Italia launched its services in Italy. Omnitel was a mobile operator and Infostrada (today owned by Wind) was a fixed-line operator. They belonged to Olivetti and represented the first telephone alternative to monopolists TIM and Telecom Italia.

Original majority owner Olivetti sold its interest in Omnitel and Infostrada to the German consortium Mannesmann (which had been a minority shareholder since 1997) after Olivetti took control of Telecom Italia, and thus TIM, in 1999. Mannesmann took control of Omnitel with a 53.7% equity stake.

The following year, Vodafone purchased Mannesmann, thus taking control of Omnitel. The Vodafone brand was introduced as Omnitel-Vodafone in 2001, made the primary brand as Vodafone-Omnitel in 2002; finally the current name Vodafone Italia was introduced in 2003, dropping "Omnitel" altogether. Vodafone Italy introduced the new Speechmark Logo only on 10 June 2007.

The company slogan varies from that of the international Vodafone campaign (Make the most of now) and is Life is NOW. The company website was known as 190.it as 190 is the customer care number for Vodafone Italy. Starting from July 2008, the company URL has been changed from "190.it" to "vodafone.it". The company's spokesmodel from 1999 to 2006, for both Omnitel and Vodafone, was Australian model Megan Gale^[1].

Since taking over the company, Vodafone has introduced its suite of services in Italy, such as Vodafone live! and UTMS/HSPDA services, and has collaborated in partnership to launch of Mobile virtual network operators for other corporations.

In 2007, like in Spain, Vodafone Italy has bought the Italian branch of Tele2^[2], renaming later as TeleTu in 2010, adding fixed-line network offers.

References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ [2]

External links

• Vodafone Italy Official Website