Poste Italiane has begun installing data centres in every one of its post offices, and couriers now carry server capacity to households on foot, bicycle and motor scooter. The company announced the move as part of a co-investment fund that it says will absorb six hundred million euros, with the first phase covering the post offices of a single province in the south.
Staff in the affected offices have been retrained as rack technicians and now spend their mornings lifting servers out of delivery vans and fitting them into the spaces once occupied by parcel shelving. Customers queuing for stamps are asked to wait while a technician checks cooling units, and several branches have replaced their ticket dispensers with booking screens for cloud storage slots.
A spokesperson for the company described the programme as a question of reach rather than ambition. «A data centre belongs where people already come to collect things,» the spokesperson said. «We have eight thousand locations. Each of them is now a place where a computer can be kept safe and dry, and we intend to use all of them.»
Local councils have been asked to approve the extra electrical connections, and the regional authority has created a dedicated inspection team that visits branches on a rotating timetable. The company has said the first phase will be judged on whether the servers can be delivered within the same working day as the letters they accompany.