Italy's internet is 30 years old. But is it finally speeding up?

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was just 11 years old when boffins at Pisa University sent a stream of data - travelling at mere bits per second - to Roaring Creek, Pesylvania. With it, they ushered in a new era: Italy had coected to the inteet for the first time.

Fast forward thirty years, and Renzi visited the university on Friday to mark the historic day, safe in the knowledge that Italy was no longer an inteet trailblazer.

Averaging a measly 8.73 Mbps, Italy's inteet speeds are the second lowest in the EU. When it comes to the coverage of ultra-fast broadband - access to speeds of more than 100 Mbps - things are even worse.

In the ultra-fast standings, Italy is dead last in Europe, with just one fifth of all its households capable of navigating at speeds which the rest of Europe takes for granted.

Not only are sluggish speeds a bugbear for citizens, who increasingly consume digital media online, critics also suggest that years of poor e-goveance has hamstrung the Italian economy.

Sluggish speeds have condemned the country to low rates of e-commerce while forcing iovative technology companies to move elsewhere.

“Italy's inteet woes boil down to repeated under-investment and neglect by our govements over the last 20 years," a spokesperson for the Italian govement's digital agency, AgID, told The Local.

"They were simply not interested in iovation."

After years of under-investment, Renzi pledged €6 billion of govement funds to refresh the country's outdated inteet infrastructure in March 2015.

The money will be used to do things like incentivize service providers to swap their networks of slow and ancient copper cables with mode, speedy fibre optic ones - even in isolated rural areas where inteet useage is low.

The scale of the job is so big that Amazon senior executive, Diego Piacentini, aounced earlier this year he would be leaving his job for two years in order to work for free at the govement's digital technology office in Rome.

The target is to have 85 percent of all homes ruing speeds of at least 35 megabits by 2020. It sounds fast, but current speeds in Finland average 45 Mbps.

"In addition to boosting inteet speeds the govement is challenging all departments to update their websites and offer citizens the possibility to do more from home," the spokesperson added.

If all goes to plan by 2017 it should be possible for Italian residents to do things like pay road tax, view health and pension data and file tax retus online, things which are now commonplace in most other European countries.

"Closing the digital gap with the rest of Europe is a big job, but we are going to get it done on time," the spokesperson said.