Ah guys, you've been such a goldmine of information. Thanks so much.
I was quite sure Wind was the wrong choice (as confirmed unanimously here) - TIM was not in the game, and Fastweb seemed also not to be for 2.5Gpbs. I hadn't heard of these other providers (being a 'foreigner') so I was using Trustpilot as a source but now I feel pretty confident to take the next step.
The outage that affected my neighbours was a rat having chewed through a cable. Not sure if that's a common problem (you'd think they would be well shielded), never faced any such thing with my Copper (main hazard was a car reversing into the TIM street cabinet - now it looks like the tower of Pisa 🙂 ) , but it makes me think more about a backup solution since they were down for almost 2 weeks (with Wind3's fantastic customer support to thank for this).
About the router I'm still undecided. For the Wifi element I have 6 TP-Link Deco M5s covering the home today (have very thick walls so run CAT 6 to each of the 3 floors and then 2 mesh devices per floor) - was going to upgrade them to X60s to be sure to have a surplus of Wifi bandwidth and not introduce a bottleneck there.
As far as router/modem capabilities I've no need for Port fowarding, QOS, dynamic DNS (anyway I understood we'll get a static IP for free?) , just a device that the device is mainstream and well supported in Italy to take new iterations of the network standards as and when they are released. Even if they are mostly all coming from China (except of course Fritz), I'm guessing the Network Providers have their list of preferred/supported manufacturers, which ZTE seems to be part of, so taking their router, since my technical needs are quite simple (2x 2.5Gbps ports, 1 each for WAN/LAN) and external ONT (to avoid overheating issues I've read of with internal SPFs) I may as well run with that. What's nice is that there's no lock-in to the router so if my needs change I can just send it back to them. Not sure if then they reduce the monthly charge but no big deal.
I think I'll skip the landline option then. We have TIM mobile in 5G which is well served here. Need to see what they offer me when I send the disdetta for the Fibre. I'll lose their unlimited Unica offer but looking at the stats, 100Gb per line/month will be more than enough so I reckon with 4x10€ a month each we'll be sorted + 30€ for the new line - it's more or less at what I pay TIM today. Anyone know how you can actually SPEAK to a human at TIM for commercial topics? I keep getting their bloody 'Angie' bot which wastes so much time, and I don;t really want to spend an hour in their nearest shop. Is there a secret way to have a conversation with a human about what packages I can have for my mobile needs (sorry it's a bit off-topic for this forum but thought I'd ask . Thanks in advance 🙂
