Fibre permits: if the council does not respond in four months, the permit is granted

If the council does not decide, at some point silence decides for it. Regulation (EU) 2024/1309 — the Gigabit Infrastructure Regulation — “shall apply from 12 November 2025” (Article 19(2)), and its Article 8, literally titled “Absence of a decision on the application for permit”, provides that if the competent authority has not ruled within the Article 7 deadline, the permit is treated as granted anyway. This is no longer an open-ended wait: it is a deadline with a written consequence. But it only holds for whoever knows exactly when that deadline started — and the clock starts from the complete application, not the application as filed.

The clock starts from the complete application

Article 7(5) sets the rule: “The competent authorities shall grant or refuse permits, other than rights of way, within 4 months of the date of receipt of a complete permit application.” The word that matters is “complete”, and the Regulation guards it against a common misreading: the authority has 20 working days to determine whether the application is complete, and to invite the applicant to fill any gap. The text is explicit: “The determination by the competent authority that the permit application is complete shall not result in any suspension or interruption of the overall four-month period for the examination of the permit application, starting from the date of receipt of the complete application.” The clock starts once, at completeness, and does not stop after that. There is also an earlier filter: within 15 working days the authorities may reject applications from an operator that has not made the minimum information available via the single information point, as Article 6 requires (Article 7(4)).

Extensions exist, but they are tight

The deadline can be extended, not freely. The Regulation is explicit: “Member States shall set out and publish, in advance, via a single information point, the grounds on which the competent authority can, in exceptional and duly substantiated cases, acting on its own motion, extend the deadlines” (Article 7(5)), and there is a ceiling: “Any extension shall be the shortest possible and shall not exceed four months”. The line that removes the most common excuse reads: “An extension shall not be requested in order to obtain missing information which the competent authority has failed to request from the applicant” within those 20 days. Every refusal, too, “shall be duly substantiated on the basis of objective, transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate criteria” — a generic denial is not enough.

The silence that becomes a permit

This is where Article 8 comes in: “In the absence of a decision from the competent authority within the applicable deadline referred to in Article 7(5), the permit shall be deemed to be granted upon expiry of that deadline.” One distinction matters: it applies “provided that the permit-granting procedure does not concern rights of way.” Rights of way have their own four-month deadline (Article 7(6), “within the four-month period or the deadline set by national law, whichever is shorter, from the date of receipt of the complete application except in the case of expropriation”), but they sit outside the deemed-granted mechanism: for those, silence stays silence, not a permit. For everything else — permits proper — silence past the fourth month has the effect of a decision.

The written confirmation, and who can object

An implicit permit nobody certifies never makes it onto a site, so the Regulation adds an operational right: “Upon request, the operator or any affected party shall be entitled to receive written confirmation from the competent authority that, where applicable, the permit has been implicitly granted” (Article 8(1)). Without that confirmation, the date that matters is a calculation made in-house, good only against whoever made it. The Regulation balances the mechanism from the other side too: “Member States shall ensure that any third party affected has the right to intervene in the administrative procedure and to challenge the decision granting the permit” — a permit matured through silence can be obtained, but it can also be challenged.

The opt-out Member States may choose

Article 8(2) leaves Member States free to derogate from the deemed-granted rule, but only if at least one equivalent remedy stays available: the operator’s right “to claim compensation for damage, in accordance with national law”, or the option to “refer the case to a court or to a supervising authority.” If a Member State takes that route, paragraph 3 still requires a concrete step: once the deadline expires, the authority must convene the applicant “no later than two months after the submission of the request” to a meeting, and then provide “the written account of the discussion […] indicating to the operator a date when a decision on the permit application is to be issued.” Whether Italy has exercised this opt-out has not been verified as of this article. We checked the two most recent EU-delegation laws — the 2024 one (now Law No. 91 of 13 June 2025) and the 2025 bill — extracting every EU regulation cited in each parliamentary dossier: Regulation 2024/1309 appears in neither list. That is an indication, not conclusive negative proof: we do not presume it absent, we flag it as not confirmed on a primary source.

When no permit is needed at all

Article 9 exempts three categories of civil works from the permit-granting procedure entirely: “repair and maintenance works which are limited in scope, such as in terms of value, size, impact and duration” (point a); “limited technical upgrades of existing works or installations, with limited impact” (point b); “small-scale civil works that are limited in scope […] required for the deployment of VHCNs” (point c). But the exemption does not apply on its own: “Member States shall identify the types of civil works to which paragraph 1 applies”, published via the single information point (Article 9(2)). Until that list is published, “limited in scope” remains a phrase in the Regulation, not an operational threshold. Even where the list exists, authorities remain free to require a permit for “physical infrastructure […] protected for reasons of architectural, historical, religious or environmental value”, or “where necessary for reasons of public security, defence, safety, environmental or public health reasons, or to protect the security of critical infrastructure” (Article 9(3)). No Italian identification of these categories on a primary source has been verified as of this article: same caution as above, we do not infer it.

We have covered this Regulation before, from the right to access existing physical infrastructure — the step before digging — to the fibre requirement in new buildings and the single information point with the network register. Here the subject is the step after: not whether the duct exists or the building is ready, but whether — and when — the permit to lay fibre actually arrives.

Into the schedule, as a line with a date

The operational consequence: every date in this procedure belongs in the project schedule as a line of its own, with a calculated deadline — the application date, 20 working days for completeness, four months from completeness, any extension only if the ground was published before the application was even filed. On acceptance, we check that the works built are the ones the permit covers, implicit or explicit: a permit matured through silence authorises exactly what the application described. Applications, requests to complete them, silences, written confirmations obtained and routes actually laid feed a single network map: the basis on which an AI flags which authority answers in what time and where the next route should run, while the team decides together with CSIDIA, the group’s other company. Always in two modes: 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.

The Regulation needs no transposition to take effect: it has applied directly for nine months. The four-month deadline runs from the complete application, is not suspended by the completeness check, allows extensions only if published in advance and never to cover what the authority failed to ask for. On expiry, the permit is deemed granted — except for rights of way, except where a national opt-out not yet confirmed applies — but only the written confirmation turns it into a document you can build on.

Have you got a permit application stalled for months, or need to work out when it matures? Talk to an engineer: the site visit costs nothing, and the written confirmation is requested before the site opens, not after work has started.