The digital and economic future of a territory can begin right next to the vestiges of a great past. “November 25, 2005: Convergenze is born, one kilometer from the ruins of Paestum. Mission: to reduce the digital divide in the Cilento area,” explains Rosario Pingaro, the provider’s founder and CEO. It started with wireless broadband service and then evolved to offer a range of “convergent” products spanning telecoms (including a proprietary fiber optic network), energy, TV, communications, and virtualization. Now also an MVNO.
Convergenze confirms a thesis put forward by Mehran Gul, a British economist and author of The Geography of Innovation (July 2025): innovation can emerge in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. It doesn’t always have to take the form that Silicon Valley has sought to prescribe for the rest of the world. And it succeeds when it manages to understand and align with the needs of the territory in which it operates.
A study from the University of Salerno, currently under review for publication, has analyzed the case of Convergenze Spa, a benefit corporation, examining “how public-private collaboration can drive digital transformation in rural areas and promote social sustainability.”
The paper demonstrates that public-private collaboration aimed at promoting the digital transformation of rural areas through fiber optic deployment in underserved zones “can generate significant social sustainability impacts that, in turn, reinforce the very foundations of the collaboration, sustaining new cycles of digital transformation and triggering a self-sustaining virtuous cycle.”
The study is part of a broad body of literature, both Italian and international, on the social and economic benefits of network connectivity. According to a Deloitte study from February, fiber generates €1.1 of GDP for every euro invested; network usage adds a further €3.3. This amounts to a total contribution of €21.5 billion to GDP in underserved areas, comprising €5.3 billion from construction and €16.2 billion from the utilization phase.
This is also the story of Convergenze, albeit a local one. The provider, founded in Capaccio Paestum (Salerno), operates 12,800 km of fiber across 14 municipalities, serving 30,000 real estate units. “We add around 2,000 per year,” says Pingaro.
“Many local businesses have benefited. Wineries, communications agencies, hydraulic wheelbarrow manufacturers, mini-track producers for agricultural and construction use, packaged produce growers.” “They use fast internet for management control; sensors to monitor and manage plants located 15–20 km away; and data analytics with business intelligence,” he adds.
The company’s social mission is intertwined with its convergent identity: it also offers free-to-air digital terrestrial television (DTT) channels via streaming. But what does TV streaming have to do with a local provider that has neither the national ambitions of TimVision nor those of a Fastweb from two decades ago, when it offered cable TV?
“It has everything to do with it,” answers Pingaro. “It makes sense when a user doesn’t have a DTT antenna or wants to receive TV content on the go. We provide DTT channels plus additional channels.”
“Since we became an MVNO, we are a fully integrated fixed-mobile-TV operator,” he says. Convergenze seeks to own not only multiple service assets but also the full data chain. “In 95% of cases, our customers’ traffic runs across Convergenze’s own network, without passing through grey zones of uncertain quality. We have placed routers at the major global IXPs: South Africa, Brazil, and obviously European capitals, the US, and Hong Kong.” Not forgetting Rome. It’s not simply a matter of “convergence” as an end in itself, but a matter of quality for the end user, in service of the company’s social mission.
The same spirit runs through Convergenze’s energy supply offering: “We source only from renewables. We did this right after our stock market listing in 2014. We were among the first providers to combine energy and telecoms,” Pingaro adds. A formula that is now being adopted by major operators, as a February report by I-Com and Join confirms. In this difficult period for European telecoms, “everyone is betting on customer relationships: operators need to become a one-stop shop for multiple services. It works when you’re an integrated operator with control over the entire supply chain and value chain. We have a single IT system managing all processes for both the telecom and energy markets.”
“Our sales team is also converged, specialists in both telecoms and energy,” he adds.
The “convergence” even extends to electric vehicle charging stations. “We patented a charging solution with a hotspot that registers the user through a captive portal. That way, even a tourist without an internet contract can get connected in 30 seconds,” says Pingaro.
Today Convergenze has 100 employees and €26 million in revenue, up from €10 million at the time of its stock market listing. “But in 2025 it fell by 1%: the telecom and energy markets are very aggressive; telemarketing is rife to poach customers. We have paid the price of our ethical approach: we don’t use external call centers.” On the topic of call centers, Convergenze plans to increase its use of AI for inbound customer service, but only for off-hours support (to support AI chatbots, it plans to expand its two small edge data centers in the future). Innovation yes, but with a human eye on the social dimension, even in the face of advancing artificial intelligence.
