Access to existing physical infrastructure: the right has applied since 12 November 2025

Before you dig, ask in writing. The duct your route needs may already exist — under a road, inside a tunnel, alongside a railway, next to a street-lighting pole — and belong to someone else. For nearly nine months a European regulation has given you the right to request access to it, under fair and reasonable terms. Regulation (EU) 2024/1309, the Gigabit Infrastructure Regulation, has applied since 12 November 2025 (Article 19(2)), and its Article 3 is the provision on access to existing physical infrastructure. The problem is not that the right does not exist: it is that almost nobody exercises it the only way that produces an effect — in writing.

Who has to open the door

Article 3’s obligation is not limited to telecoms operators. The definition of “network operator”, in Article 2, point (1), covers anyone providing physical infrastructure for “a service of production, transport or distribution of” gas, “electricity, including public lighting”, heating, “water, including disposal or treatment of wastewater and sewage, and drainage systems”, as well as anyone providing “transport services, including railways, roads including urban roads, tunnels, ports and airports”. The duct you are looking for can therefore sit under a council road, in the drainage channel of a rail underpass, along a water utility’s network, or next to street-lighting cabling: none of these bodies lays fibre, yet all are “network operators” for the purposes of Article 3.

The written request, with a timetable

Article 3(1) requires network operators and public sector bodies owning or controlling physical infrastructure to meet, “upon written request of an operator, all reasonable requests for access to that physical infrastructure under fair and reasonable terms and conditions, including price”. Where the holder is a public sector body, the duty is stronger still: it must meet those requests “also under non-discriminatory terms and conditions”. But the clause that decides whether the request has any effect is the next one: “Such written requests shall specify the elements of the physical infrastructure for which the access is requested, including a specific time frame.” A generic email asking about “duct availability in the area” is not enough: it lacks the specific element, it lacks the time frame. A phone call, however courteous, starts nothing — nothing in the text recognises it as a request.

The month runs from the complete request

Article 3(7) is the deadline the whole piece turns on. In the event of a refusal, whoever owns or controls the infrastructure “shall communicate to the access seeker, in writing, the specific and detailed reasons for such refusal no later than one month from the date of the receipt of the complete request for access”. The exception is national critical infrastructure “as defined in national law”, for which “specific and detailed reasons shall not be required” in the refusal notice. For everything else the written reasoning is still owed within one month, and the word that matters is “complete”: if the request is vague, the month does not run from when it was sent, but from when it was made complete — and the time lost clarifying it is time the schedule never gets back.

Six grounds, not one more

Refusal is not discretionary. Article 3(5) lists a closed set of grounds: the infrastructure is “not technically suitable to host any of the elements of VHCN” requested (a); a “lack of availability of space”, “including after taking into account the future need for space of the access provider that is sufficiently demonstrated” (b); “justified reasons regarding safety, national security and public health” (c); reasons regarding “the integrity and security of any network, in particular national critical infrastructure” (d); a “duly justified risk of serious interferences” with other services on the same infrastructure (e); and the availability of “viable alternative means of passive wholesale physical access” on fair and reasonable terms (f). A refusal justified outside these six leaves, for the first time, a document to challenge it with.

If the dispute reaches the regulator

A refusal — or silence past the month — is not the final word. Article 13(1) gives either party the right to refer the dispute to the competent national dispute settlement body, and point (a) says when that dispute arises: “where access to existing infrastructure is refused or agreement on specific terms and conditions, including price, has not been reached within one month of the date of receipt of the request for access under Article 3”. The month here is not a deadline for referring: it is the time within which agreement must have been reached, failing which the dispute route opens — a different clock from the one in paragraph 7, on the reasons a refusal must be given in writing. Article 13(2)(a) then sets the response time: a binding decision “within four months of the date of the receipt of the dispute settlement request”. Which body carries out that role in Italy, under Article 14, is a national choice we do not verify here. Four months is a defined period, not an open-ended wait.

Private land and the declared price

Article 3(2) covers a different case: legal persons “who are primarily active as tenants of land, or as holders of rights over land, other than property rights”, or who “manage lease contracts on behalf of land owners”, negotiate access “in good faith, including on the price”. The less well-known part comes next: agreements reached must be reported to the national regulatory authority, “including the agreed price”. This is not decorative transparency — it turns a price into a verifiable data point, not a figure negotiated privately and never checked again.

A Member State option, not a general obligation

Paragraph 3 leaves Member States — it does not require them — the option of extending the obligation to “owners of private commercial buildings which are not owned or controlled by a network operator”, where three conditions hold together: “the building is located in a rural or remote area as defined by Member States”; “there is no VHCN of the same type” already available or planned in the area “according to the information collected via the single information point”; and there is no physical infrastructure of operators or public sector bodies in the area that is “technically suitable to host elements of VHCNs”. Paragraph 8, in the same way, leaves them the option of establishing a body to coordinate access requests to public sector infrastructure. Whether Italy has exercised either option has not been verified as of this article: that is a question for the primary legal source, not an assumption. The difference between “not verified” and “does not exist” matters here.

We have covered elsewhere, from the same Regulation, in-building physical infrastructure and the single information point with the network register. The subject here is another one: infrastructure that, outside the building, already belongs to someone else.

Into the schedule, before the excavation bill of quantities

The operational consequence: the search for existing physical infrastructure belongs in the project schedule before the excavation bill of quantities, with the written request — complete, with a specific time frame — as a line item of its own. Anyone designing a route from this check finds out in weeks, not on site, whether the duct exists; and a refusal justified under one of the six points is a document worth having in a tender or in litigation, which a verbal request never produces. In the specifications we write and review that request becomes a line with a send date and the Article 3(7) deadline; on acceptance we check that the route built is the one access was granted for, and that the terms — price included — are the ones applied. The responses to each request — granted or refused, on which ground, on what timeline — together with the as-built record, feed a single network map: the basis on which an AI proposes the next route from what is already known to exist and who owns it, instead of restarting every project from zero. The team decides, together with CSIDIA, the group’s other company: on autonomous on-premise machines that require no deep integration into the client’s network, or on dedicated cloud with a data centre in Italy — always with shared management.

The point.

There is no transposition to wait for: the Regulation applies directly in every Member State, and has done for nine months. A written request, complete, with a specific time frame, is the only act that starts the clock and forces a refusal to pick one of the six permitted grounds. A phone call, a vague email or an informal site visit start no deadline at all.

Does your next route run under a road, a railway or a tunnel that might already carry a duct? Talk to an engineer: the site visit costs nothing, and the written request is drafted before the bill of quantities is opened, not after.