INWIT Brand Guidelines: Italy’s Tower Company, Spun Off From TIM in 2015

TIM’s towers, made into a company.

INWIT — short for Infrastrutture Wireless Italiane, “Italian wireless infrastructure” — was set up on 14 January 2015 to take over the tower business of Telecom Italia, now TIM, Italian Wikipedia says. The transfer took effect on 1 April 2015, when the new company took charge of the masts, other passive infrastructure and the contracts with tenants that had belonged to the former state operator. Its shares have traded in Milan since 22 June 2015. It has its registered office in Milan and offices in Rome.

The company tells the same story in three steps on its website: founded in 2015 “following a spin-off from TIM”; consolidated in 2020 through the merger with Vodafone Towers and entry into the FTSE MIB index; and, from 2020 to 2024, the adoption of what it calls a “Tower as a Service” model, adding indoor coverage and services for businesses to the towers themselves.

The 2020 step was the decisive one. The merger of Vodafone Towers Italia into INWIT was completed on 31 March 2020, according to Italian Wikipedia; INWIT’s own press archive lists a July 2019 announcement headed “Largest Tower Operator in Italy created to accelerate 5G development.” RCR Wireless summarised the arc in August 2024: “TIM established Inwit in 2015 when it spun off its towers arm, and in 2020, the company merger with Vodafone Towers, expanding its tower footprint.” In the same year the shares joined the FTSE MIB and the STOXX Europe 600.

Towers, tunnels and small cells.

INWIT works as a neutral host: it owns the structures and rents space on them to several operators at once. Italian Wikipedia groups its work in three areas — Tower Infra, the towers, pylons and poles; Smart Infra, the distributed antenna systems, small cells and repeaters that carry signals indoors and underground; and Real Estate Infra, the land and leases beneath its sites.

By the end of June 2025, the same source says, its network comprised more than 25,000 towers across Italy, with about 60,000 hosting contracts, and around 11,000 remote units of indoor and outdoor equipment covering more than 680 locations and over 1,000 kilometres of road and motorway tunnels. In October 2026 the trade press put the tower count at about 26,000, a figure given by its general manager, Diego Galli.

Its city projects are among its most visible. Italian Wikipedia records a fifteen-year agreement with Fiera Milano, announced in March 2024, to run the telecoms infrastructure of the trade-fair sites at Rho and the Allianz MiCo in Milan; an agreement with A2A Smart City, announced in November 2024, to fit 5G small cells to up to about 1,000 street lamps in Milan; mobile coverage for the city’s M4 metro line; and, from 30 October 2024, a 52.08 per cent stake in Smart City Roma, the company behind the Roma 5G concession, which covers metro lines, squares and public buildings in Rome.

The company sums up its purpose as “Sharing Connections” and lists “passion” — for customers, people, results and digital — as the core of its values. It presents sharing as its environmental argument too: one tower used by several operators, it says, avoids duplication and saves land and materials.

Design and documentation.

Tower companies sell something most people never notice: space on a mast. A mobile operator rents a slot on a tower, a rooftop or a small cell, and several rivals can share the same steel. That makes the business hard to picture, so the companies that run it tend to lean on a small set of images to explain what they do.

The most common is the structure itself. A steel lattice mast against a wide sky, a slim monopole beside a motorway, a cluster of antennas over a city skyline at dusk, or a lone rural tower at sunset all stand in for coverage that cannot be seen. People appear too, usually climbers in harnesses and helmets working high on a tower, a reminder that the sites are built and maintained by hand.

The second register is the map. Annual reports and investor pages often show a country or a continent dotted with sites, because the number and spread of locations is the product. Site counts, country lists and phrases such as “neutral host” or “shared infrastructure” do much of the talking.

The industry also meets in public. Trade shows such as Connect (X) in the United States and the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona put tower companies beside the operators they serve, with stands, renderings of towers and maps of networks. For a design guide, the interest lies in how a business made of steel, leases and coordinates turns that into a calm, legible identity.

Owners, tenants and a court case.

Ownership has moved from operators to investors. TIM sold down its holding over several years; in August 2024, RCR Wireless reported, it agreed to sell its last indirect stake — held through a share of the holding company Daphne 3 — to a consortium led by the French investment firm Ardian, which already controlled that holding. In October 2026 Teleborsa, citing Reuters, reported that Ardian held about 32 per cent of INWIT and Oak Holdings 1, a vehicle backed by GIP, Vodafone and KKR, about 39 per cent. The two were said to be studying an offer for the shares held by the market and talking to banks about financing; the talks were not concluded, and INWIT said it had no information. No offer had been launched at the time of writing, and the shares remained listed in Milan.

The same year brought a dispute with its two largest customers. On 19 March 2026 TIM and Fastweb+Vodafone announced a non-binding plan for a joint venture to build up to 6,000 new towers. Fastweb+Vodafone gave notice on 25 March 2026 that it would end its master service agreement with INWIT from March 2028, and TIM announced on 29 March that it would also withdraw; INWIT says both agreements run until 2038. On 13 July 2026 the Court of Milan rejected INWIT’s requests for interim measures, and on 19 October it confirmed the rejection in the Fastweb case finding no urgency and leaving the length of the contracts to the full trial, Teleborsa reported. The main proceedings were still under way on 5 November 2026, when INWIT said the termination “is not an established and agreed fact.”

For a design guide, INWIT shows how a utility-like business builds a brand around sharing rather than ownership. Compare Vantage Towers, the Vodafone-linked towerco, and Vodafone, whose Italian towers it absorbed in 2020. For this guide we use a navy, a blue and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep INWIT’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.