Vendor lineage
Italtel - a century of somebody else's telephone network
Founded as a Siemens branch in 1921, and still building networks a hundred years later under different owners.
Italtel began in 1921 as an Italian branch of Siemens and became one of the national champions that built Italy's telephone infrastructure - the pattern almost every European country repeated with a domestic manufacturer tied to its state operator. It is still trading, now an ICT and network integration business, and its shareholder list has been rewritten repeatedly.
The European national-champion model is worth understanding because it produced a different industry from the American one this timeline mostly documents. A manufacturer whose principal customer is the state telephone monopoly optimises for that relationship: long product cycles, deep integration with one operator's practices, and engineering aimed at a specification rather than at a market.
What happens to such firms when the monopoly ends is the interesting part, and Italtel is a hundred-year worked example of it - surviving by becoming an integrator of other people's equipment rather than remaining a manufacturer of its own.