Italy is preparing to leap ahead of the United States and Canada by deploying a minimum of 100Mbps broadband to 85 percent of Italy by 2020 and a guarantee that everyone else will be able to access at least 30Mbps service by that time as well.

Telecom Italia will primarily use its own financial resources to lay fiber to the home service to 40 of Italy’s biggest cities over the next two years. The government has pushed for major improvements in Italian broadband to catch up with the rest of Europe and beat the U.S. and Canada. It will spend $6.5 billion dollars to accelerate the development of a nationwide fiber network and the government has also extended a range of incentives to persuade operators to boost Internet speeds without boosting prices for Italian consumers.

Once the fiber network is complete, Telecom Italia can further increase speeds to 1Gbps or more.