Italy is about to enter into a $1.5 billion deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for the use of the Starlink service in secure government telecommunications.
The information is being released this Sunday by Bloomberg, which cites sources close to the process. The agreement would have already had the green light from the country’s intelligence services and Ministry of Defense.
Negotiations have been ongoing since 2023 and now appear to have gotten a boost with the meeting this Saturday between Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, at the Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
The objective, the news agency’s sources indicate, is for SpaceX to provide Italy with a full range of high-level encryption for telephone and internet services used by the Government.
The plan also includes communications services for the Italian military in the Mediterranean, as well as the implementation of a direct satellite access telephone network in Italy for emergencies such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters.
If the agreement comes to fruition, it will be the first major one in Europe for SpaceX, whose Starlink service, in the last year alone, began operating in another 20 countries, from Ghana to Argentina.
The news comes on the same day that the Sunday Times reports that Amazon, which is developing the Kuiper project to rival Starlink, intends to operate in the UK telecommunications market.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
