New AGCOM labels: who may still say fibre, and who gets the blue

You sell the same offer at two street numbers: at one the fibre reaches inside the flat, at the other it stops at the street cabinet. By 12 February 2027 that difference decides the colour of the label you print on your advertising, and the one deciding is the worse address, not the better. If you cannot draw the boundary between the two areas on a map, you are not choosing a colour — you are guessing it.

What was adopted, and when it bites

On 29 July 2026 the AGCOM Council adopted resolution no. 207/26/CONS, amending and supplementing resolution no. 292/18/CONS, published on 12 August. It closes the proceeding opened on 19 November 2025 with resolution no. 285/25/CONS. Article 2 allows six months from publication to implement its provisions — 12 February 2027 — and sets up a monitoring working group with fixed-line, FWA and satellite operators and consumer associations. The deadline for challenging it before the Lazio Regional Administrative Court, sixty days from publication, is 11 October 2026.

The names are not slogans, they are network definitions

Resolution 292/18/CONS does not regulate advertising in general: article by article, it defines where the fibre stops. FTTH is fibre along the whole run, from the exchange ODF to the network termination point where the ONT sits. FTTB stops at the base of the building and uses copper inside. FTTN stops at an intermediate node — if that node is the street cabinet it is called FTTC — and carries on in copper. FTTE is copper throughout, from the exchange main distribution frame to the home. FWA is fibre or another backhaul medium up to the base station, then radio.

Everything else follows from those five definitions, with a rule worth reading twice: the label tracks the architecture inside the commercial footprint of the offer, «nonché parzialmente anche FTTH, in funzione della relativa copertura geografica» — partly FTTH as well, depending on the geographic coverage. An offer sold across a mixed footprint takes the mixed label even at the addresses where the fibre reaches inside: the colour does not describe the single line, it describes the worst of what you hold inside that footprint.

The four colours, after the amendment

Green, letter F subtitled fibra (Pantone 361), stays reserved for FTTH and FTTB. Yellow (Pantone 137) is the hybrid case, and both the wording and the letters change: the captions become «misto fibra-rame» and «misto fibra - radio», fibre-copper mix and fibre-radio mix, and for radio the letter is no longer R or FR but FWA, because in the Authority’s view the old R was «confondibile con l’iniziale di “Rame”», confusable with the initial of copper. Red (Pantone 192) stays for copper and for FWA that does not reach ultra-broadband: the word fibra may not be used where the service is provided, «anche parzialmente» (even in part), on architectures outside green and yellow — FTTE in particular. The line between red and yellow, for FWA, now reads as offers «con velocità garantite di picco per cliente superiori o pari a 30 Mbps» (guaranteed peak speeds per customer of 30 Mbps or above): not a headline speed, a guaranteed one.

The fourth colour is new: blue, Pantone 2132, the letters FWA subtitled «misto fibra-radio VHCN».

The blue label has a price, and it is not a printing cost

Blue is not earned by saying 5G. It is earned by meeting Criterion 3 of the BEREC Guidelines on Very High Capacity Networks, BoR (25) 182 of 4 December 2025 — and Criterion 3 is the fixed-line one, not the wireless one. The figures are these: at least 1000 Mbps downlink, at least 200 Mbps uplink, IP packet error ratio no higher than 0.05%, IP packet loss ratio no higher than 0.0025%, round-trip IP packet delay no higher than 10 ms, IP packet delay variation no higher than 2 ms, IP service availability of at least 99.9% per year. By comparison Criterion 4, the wireless one, stops at 350 and 50 Mbps and at 18 ms: whoever wants blue on a radio network accepts the fibre yardstick.

Three points in the guidelines decide whether you can carry it. First, capability counts, not the price list, because “it is neither necessary that the network actually offers such a service nor that all services provided by the network have to meet the performance thresholds 1”, and the regulator may require a test service in the network. Second, the assessment is made sub-area by sub-area — a building, a group of houses, the area of an access node — and qualifies the part of the network covering the compliant sub-area, not the network as a block. Third, the measurement point is where the subscriber line ends inside the home, “not including limitations from the customer premises equipment”: the customer’s router neither helps nor hurts the verdict.

Then comes the condition the Authority added of its own, and it is not technical. Blue may be used «solo nel caso in cui non siano imposti limiti contrattuali, in termini di limitazione della velocità, tali da rendere le prestazioni dell’offerta inferiori a quelle ottenibili dalla infrastruttura utilizzata» (only where no contractual speed cap makes the offer perform below what the infrastructure can deliver). A gigabit-capable network and an offer capped at 300 Mbps do not add up to a blue label.

Next to the label, now, there is a link

On the targeted one-to-one channels — websites, online contracting pages, customer care — a link must now sit alongside the article 7 information, pointing to the technical transparency page under article 5(6) of Annex A to resolution no. 156/23/CONS: the section that regulation wants «accessibile con un solo pulsante dalla home page», one button from the home page, carrying offer by offer the minimum, maximum and normally available speeds, the maximum delay and the maximum packet loss ratio. From 12 February 2027 the colour and the figures sit on the same screen that already carries the list of technologies available at the address. If the label is blue and the sheet declares 300 Mbps, anyone can see the contradiction.

Not a line in the resolution is about penalties. The teeth are in the norm that ordered the Authority to set the names: article 19-quindecies(3) of decree-law no. 148 of 16 October 2017 makes it a «pratica commerciale scorretta», an unfair commercial practice, to communicate to the public an offer of electronic communications services «che non rispetti le caratteristiche tecniche definite dall’Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni» — not complying with the technical characteristics defined by the Communications Authority.

What we do not know

The resolution sets no measurement protocol, no periodicity and no verifying body for Criterion 3, and says nothing about an offer already on sale whose sub-area stops meeting the thresholds. The article 2 working group has no published calendar or output as of today. The blue label, as drafted, concerns FWA offers: satellite operators sit at the table, but the operative part does not name them. And the 2017 classification was written into article 71 of the electronic communications code in its 2003 numbering; the code was rewritten in 2021 and the article that took that place, 98-quindecies, does not carry it. Where that sentence lives today is a question to ask, not a risk to rule out.

The point.

Two different jobs, and both have to be done. The first is contractual: the label rule becomes a clause in the sales system specification — which architecture serves which footprint, which threshold separates yellow from red, which measurements support blue — with an acceptance check that starts from an advertising screen and works back to the network stretch justifying it, testing and documentation handed over together. The second is data governance: as-built records, registry traces, measurements, alarms and commercial footprints stop being separate archives and become one map of the network, where what colour is this address today is a query and not a week of phone calls. Where an AI is needed to keep that map current and explain why a sub-area dropped below the thresholds, it runs inside your perimeter — on-premise or dedicated cloud with data centres in Italy — with CSIDIA, the other company in the group. Our own teams, no subcontracting.

Need to settle what colour your network really is, address by address? Talk to an engineer: half an hour to find where the chain breaks.