— By the Namex Editorial Staff
Today marks the start of a new series: COMMUNITY STORIES.
We’re giving space to the stories of those who, every day, build a piece, large or small, of Italy’s Internet network. The word ISP hides a world of nuance, made up of people, evolutions, and anecdotes.
We begin from Puglia, from Bari, where this and other stories were born over beers at BARINOG. We interviewed Aldo Altobello, president of AMT Services and one of the pioneers of commercial Internet in southern Italy.
“AMT was born almost as a game, in Rome in 1996. There were three of us, flatmates, the three letters of the name AMT: Massimo, Tommaso and myself”. These are the formative years for internet in Italy, as remembered by Aldo Altobello, president of Bari-based AMT. A game, yes, but one that’s been going on for three decades with a certain sign of the future written in fibre. And quite a strange game for the time, that of AMT. Futuristic, even; partly by chance or partly through an intuition of those three twenty-somethings in love with the great global network. Because “we took the exact opposite path to current telcos. We started by selling advanced services to companies and public administrations, then moved on to also offering network access”.
Aldo worked at Italcable, the Italian state concessionaire company for international telecommunications services. Massimo and Tommaso at Procter and Gamble. They therefore combined different skills, from technology to finance. “One day Tommaso comes back from work and says: there’s a law for youth entrepreneurship. So we drafted a business project. The State gave us a billion old lire, 80% as a grant”. A billion can change three lads’ lives. But the difficult part comes after winning the project. “We asked ourselves: what now? We all had good positions. We had to resign to start the company”.
Chance again pushes them towards their shared future. Aldo knows someone from Space Software Italia, now Thales Alenia Space. “He tells me: we have a project in Taranto, we don’t know who to send. I reply: ‘I know someone, you’ve got him right in front of you'”. It’s AMT’s first contract. And also the pretext for making “the big leap”, as Aldo calls it. Resigning from a secure job, returning to the South, becoming entrepreneurs.
They move to Bari. But the second contract isn’t from Puglia: the tourism information system for Trento province, years 1998-1999. Why would someone from Trento call people from Bari? “Their entire system was on Oracle platform, which we had strong background in. It was Oracle itself that recommended us to Trento”.
The third project arrives in the early 2000s, this too not from Puglia. Banche delle Marche, for derivatives pricing. AMT developed it with some professors from Bologna university.
“The bank didn’t know Oracle, didn’t want to use it. The director asked us if our product could stay on our servers. That’s how we moved into cloud. Even though it wasn’t called that yet, but outsourcing”.
The software ran on their machines, managed by them but owned by the bank.
Time passes, the next corporate leap arrives.
“We now had a mini data centre. Some clients would get furious as hyenas because applications weren’t working. But it wasn’t a software problem, rather a network one”.
AMT therefore thinks of also offering access. Here too there’s a fortuitous triggering event. Year 2003, the Ferri group bankruptcy (housewares), “where Mimmo Paparella worked, who handled the Ferri network management with some people skilled in the matter”. New resources and skills. AMT begins selling the connections of the era: ADSL, HDSL, CDN.
Now instead, AMT has its own fibre between Bari and Foggia, where it covers 15,200 property units, businesses and homes. It owns 200 Gigabit transport rings reaching Foggia. POPs in all municipalities between Bari and Foggia (except the Gargano).
With these numbers and this now-acquired identity, “being in an IXP is necessary. We’re in the Namex IXPs in Bari and Rome and at MIX in Milan”. Indeed because, as he puts it, “you can’t avoid being in an IXP if you want to provide high network quality. A need that emerged after we exceeded a certain volume of traffic towards the internet”.
“And sometimes it’s also mandatory: to participate in the Puglia Region’s RUPAR tender, which we won, we had to be in at least two exchanges”.
Who knows if being in an IXP reminds those at AMT a bit of their youth period when they shared a flat in Rome. Joking aside, in an IXP you really become part of a reality that’s no longer just local, but also national, global. A spirit that fundamentally, ante litteram, as demonstrated by the first projects obtained, AMT has shown since its beginnings.
