FA.RI Digital Lab Reinvents Next-Generation Smart Education with Optical Technologies

In the global drive for digital transformation, ICT-centered smart education has become a key component of building smart cities —a trend that is particularly strong in Italy. By training ICT professionals and strengthening the country’s digital foundation, this approach provides both the talent and innovation required for an integrated urban ICT ecosystem, clearly demonstrating the value of investing in digital learning. The Digital Lab project, promoted by Fondazione Cultura & Innovazione in collaboration with FA.RI – a partner organisation of the Foundation that is active in training through partnerships with major players in the sector – is a typical example of this approach.

Digital Lab: A Core Platform for Smart Education
Riccardo Iuzzolino, chairman of FA.RI, says that fostering ICT talent is the cornerstone of smart city development. His view highlights two essential elements for Italy’s smart cities: mature ICT technologies, like FTTO (Fiber to The Office), and skilled professionals. Technologies provide the technical foundation, while people put those technologies into practice. FA.RI Digital Lab's FTTO optical network training follows this logic. The program mainly serves teachers and students from universities and middle schools in Italy — the main talent pool for smart city projects. So far, FA.RI has delivered more than 400 targeted training sessions to over 7,000 students. These trainings focus on varied smart campus scenarios, and aim at strengthening learners' practical skills in ICT deployment and operation & maintenance (O&M). Using the FTTO architecture, FA.RI Digital Lab builds all-optical campus experimental environment that are high-speed, stable, and low-latency. These lab setups teach trainees digital access solutions that meet needs across fields such as smart government, security protection, smart office, simplified campus, green hotel, and smart healthcare. The hands-on scenarios help trainees quickly get to grips with network design and O&M.  FA.RI's forward-looking approach to partnership and resource integration also plays a vital role. Riccardo Iuzzolino emphasizes that FA.RI always looks to adopt new teaching methods and technical tools to make learning more engaging and complete. For the Digital Lab project, FA.RI partnered with Huawei, the global leader in the optical network market for 17 consecutive years, to provide FTTO teaching kits. Huawei's FTTO solution, built on PON (passive optical network) technology, ensures high-quality training experiences. The solution has been deployed in about 12,000 cases worldwide across government, education, healthcare, hotel, and manufacturing sectors. It offers broad terminal access modes, high-bandwidth fiber transmission, and the intelligent O&M platform Neosight, enhancing user experience. The FA.RI–Huawei collaboration establishes a solid base for building digital platforms for multiple industries as part of Italy's smart city efforts.

Talent Training and Solution Deployment Drive Smart City Growth
FA.RI Digital Lab's core value is enabling talent and expanding scenarios, forming a complete chain of “talent cultivation → scenario enablement → smart city development” and offering repeatable digital methods for smart cities. 

Talent cultivation: Building a Practical and Customized Training System
FA.RI Digital Lab moves away from cramming-style teaching and "combines local cases with interactive workshops". Through hands-on tasks such as network design, fiber cabling, and device commissioning, trainees gain real-world experience with FTTO. Course content and simulation tasks are tailored to learner types (e.g., students or professional engineers) and learning goals (e.g., campus network deployment or medical data transmission). This customization boosts training effectiveness and helps trainees match real job needs quickly. 
Scenario-based training: Accelerating Smart City Deployment
With skilled people as the link and a mature FTTO technology framework, FA.RI Digital Lab has helped transform many smart projects in Italy from single pilots to large-scale collaboration, providing strong use cases for smart city construction. 
Smart campus 
By deploying green FTTO networks, the lab supports interactive teaching with high bandwidth, low latency, and many simultaneous devices. This backing helps online courses, remote collaboration, and wider digital teaching upgrades in Italy. 
Smart healthcare 
With a simplified network design that offers high speed, large bandwidth, and strong reliability, the lab ensures safe and fast transmission of medical data such as images and test reports, improving diagnosis speed and care quality.
Smart hotel 
By building seamless, easy-to-wire Wi-Fi mesh networks with multi-device support and stable performance, the lab enables smart check-in, personalized service pushes, and automated device control, raising service levels across Italy's hotel industry.
Future Outlook: Building a National Smart City Talent Ecosystem 
FA.RI aims to promote its FTTO-based smart education model nationwide. As this model spreads, the technical benefits of green optical networks will reach more industries, helping create an interconnected, efficient, and sustainable smart city ecosystem across Italy.