Every time we touch a site, a core or a customer's line, I want it to come back cheaper to power, easier to prove and harder to break than we found it.
I am chief technology officer of Corvalta Mobile, a challenger mobile operator in Italy with 7.3 million mobile lines, 540,000 fixed broadband customers and €1.46 billion of revenue in 2025. I am responsible for a radio network of 9,800 sites, the core, our fixed-wireless and wholesale fibre platforms, network IT and network security. I lead 1,120 colleagues and hold €305 million of annual capital expenditure and €372 million of operating costs, a fifth of which is electricity. I report to our chief executive, Lorenzo Baldracchi, and present to the board and its audit and risk committee.
I have worked on every side of a radio site. I began in 1999 as a planning engineer at Nerantel in Rome, then spent nine years at Halvorsk Networks, an equipment maker, integrating 3G in Italy and running a Greek operator's network under contract through the financial crisis. I led the radio network at Aldera Comunicações in Lisbon, where I negotiated a sharing agreement with a rival, and from 2017 ran engineering at Torrevia Towers, which taught me what keeping a site powered really costs. I joined Corvalta in January 2021.
Four questions have occupied me since. How do we remove a supplier we had decided to remove without simply buying the same network again? How do we halve the energy each gigabyte needs while traffic keeps rising? How do we know, rather than hope, that our second core site will take over? And when the copper line that once kept a telephone working in a blackout is switched off, who keeps that customer connected now? My answers have cost Corvalta customers, a launch date and some margin; those costs sit beside the results here.
A supplier replaced, and the sites redesigned
Between January 2023 and November 2025 we replaced a high-risk supplier's radios on 4,100 sites, removing 3G and renewing batteries on the same visit. Those sites now draw 27% less electricity for the same traffic, about 38 gigawatt hours a year.
Energy per gigabyte more than halved
Network electricity fell from 448 gigawatt hours in 2022 to 362 in 2025 while data traffic rose 71%, so each gigabyte needed 53% less energy. The early 3G switch-off cost us about 21,000 lines.
Failover proved rather than assumed
After a voice outage of six hours and forty minutes in July 2024, we have switched live traffic between our two core sites eight times. One test interrupted calls for 19 minutes; the last five caused no interruption customers could see.
Copper customers moved by radio capacity
Of 168,000 customers whose copper lines were switched off, 151,000 moved with us to fibre or fixed wireless. We capped fixed-wireless homes per radio sector, giving up about €14 million a year of margin to protect mobile customers' evening speeds.
Current focus
I am moving our remaining customers onto the 5G standalone core by June 2027 and preparing the evidence for the board's decision, in the 2027 budget, on whether a third core site is needed. I am also renegotiating our rural sharing agreement with Sestriva Telecom, which renews in 2028, and growing our open-interface radio sites from 240 to about 700.
Conversations I welcome
With Corvalta's consent I would consider one non-executive seat on an infrastructure board outside telecoms, and from mid-2027 a conversation about a group CTO role in a multi-country network business. I accept a few speaking invitations a year on supplier replacement, network energy and resilience.