Italy government backs off emergency decree on broadband

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's government has decided against presenting an emergency decree to activate its plans to develop a broadband network, Junior Minister for Communications Antonello Giacomelli said on Friday.

Giacomelli had said last month that Italy, under growing pressure to strengthen its telecommunications infrastructure, was preparing to present such a decree which would have sped up the passage of the bill through parliament.

The government will decide at a meeting on Tuesday what measures to take instead, Giacomelli said, adding that the judicial affairs department in Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's office had advised against the emergency decree partly for legal reasons.

"It is difficult to justify the urgency (of an emergency decree), so in the next few days we will look into how to proceed," he said on the sidelines of a conference in Rome.

Renzi has made the development of a fibre-optic network in Italy one of his government's priorities. He says it is part of a broader plan to modernise the country's sluggish economy.

Basic fixed broadband is available almost everywhere in Italy, but only 51 percent of Italian households subscribe to it, the lowest rate in the European Union. Only 21 percent have access to faster, next-generation networks.

The EU calls for member states to ensure by 2020 that all households have access to Internet lines with download speeds above 30 megabits per second and half can access super-fast 100-megabit connections.

Italy has pledged 6 billion euros (4.26 billion pounds)to build up the networks.

(Reporting by Alberto Sisto, writing by Isla Binnie)