Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA (also known as Wind Italy) is an Italian telecom operator which offers integrated mobile, fixed and IPTV and Internet services (under Infostrada brand). Recently the WIND brand has been introduced in Canada as WIND Mobile, but it's still adopted by the former Greek sister company Wind Hellas. Wind Italy has approximately 21,000,000 mobile customers with a market share of 22.7% (placing itself behind TIM and Vodafone Italy) and 3,100,000 customers on fixed lines with a market share of 11.4% (that makes it the second largest fixed line operator, behind Telecom Italia).
Apart from being known as the third largest mobile phone company in Italy (the others are TIM, Vodafone Italy and H3G), at the end of 2007 it was ranked as 18th in Europe by subscriber numbers [1].
[edit] History
Wind was established in 1997 by the Italian Electrical Company Enel, which sold Wind in 2005 to Wind Telecom S.p.A. (former Weather Investments). In 2006 the group appointed Khaled Bichara as the Chief Operating Officer of the company. In 2011 Wind became part of Vimpelcom group, after a merger between the Russian company and the Egyptian Orascom Telecom: the newborn group appointed Khaled Bichara as Chairman of Wind and Ossama Bessada as CEO, after Luigi Gubitosi's exit.
Wind was the third mobile operator to join the Italian market (after TIM and Vodafone Italy, formerly known as Omnitel Pronto Italia), that is why it has more channels: 1800 as opposed to 900, that have been assigned before to TIM and Vodafone Italy.
Wind currently runs a GSM (900/1800/E900), GPRS, EDGE, UMTS (videocall and mobile broadband) and HSPA network. While the GSM/GPRS/EDGE network is available almost everywhere, UMTS and HSPA are still expanding in the country. Wind has been also the exclusive provider for Italy of i-mode.
Wind is the main sponsor of A.S. Roma football club.
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