Italian telecommunications operator la Societa Italiana per l’Esercizio delle Telecomunicazioni pA, SIP, disputes a report in the Italian business journal Il Sole-24 Ore which says SIP has incurred an avalanche of contract cancellations that marks a major increase from previous years. The article says la SIP’s service cancellations include an increase, in the last few weeks, to over 100,000 of lines cut off for payment defaults (of which over 15,000 are in the Lombardy region alone). Simple service cessations number a few hundred thousand, said the article, and, when one adds cancellations for portable phones, changes of residence and physiological replacements, the number of cut-off lines tops 500,000. For various reasons, including changes of residence and business failures, we have always had an average of about 450,000 to 500,000 cancellations every year for the last four to six years, says a SIP spokeswoman. Furthermore, she says, the fact that the company does not expect to get over 1m new service subscribers this year is not, as the article implies, an unprecedented, ominous occurrence. The newspaper asserts that the reduction in the number of service subscribers is due, first, to a slowdown in demand caused by the austerity measures taken by the Amato government. Secondly, it says, the boom in the use of portable phones has discouraged new connections for traditional phone service. Between 1988 and 1990, we had greater than normal increases in service contracts, of between 900,000 and 1m. These increases were the result of huge investments we had made in the network in earlier years. The investments enabled us finally to respond to latent demand and to make connections for people who had been waiting since 1985 or 1986 for phone service, the spokeswoman said. So this drop is not such a terrible thing, it’s merely a return to the average level of demand we experienced during the 1980s. That average demand for service subscriptions was approximately 850,000, she added. A chart from SIP, showing the total number of service connections (business, residence, public phone and other uses, but not including portable phones), it has made every year since 1966 and the increment, substantiates her assertion. Increments for the years 1980 to 1982 averaged 850,000. It also reveals that SIP had increases in subscribers of over 1m only in 1989 and 1990. The increment for 1991 was only 720,505. In any event, says the spokeswoman, most of SIP’s business is made up by the volume of traffic, not the actual number of users, and she doesn’t expect any negative impact on revenue. It’s not an automatic thing [to lose traffic if the number of users drops], as long as the operator continues to create new services so people will use the telephone more, she says. In fact, says Il Sole-24 Ore, SIP is experiencing a boom in requests for advanced services, including call-waiting, for which requests have exceeded 400,000.
