  tiscali s.p.a.  () is an italian telecommunications company, based in cagliari, sardinia, that provides internet and telecommunications services to its domestic market. it previously had operations in other european nations through its acquisition of many smaller european internet service providers (isps) in the late 1990s. ==history== thumbnail|tiscali campus in cagliari tiscali was created in january 1998 in cagliari by renato soru, following the deregulation of italian telephone system. the company owes its name to a sardinian mountain at which remains of an ancient village were found. from march 1999 onward, tiscali offered tiscali free net, a subscription-free internet service where customers only had to pay for the time they were online. this pushed other italian providers to repeal their fixed subscription fees, thus contributing to making the internet accessible to the masses in italy. ===ipo=== on october 1999 (during the dot-com bubble), the company went though an initial public offering (ipo) to be traded on the italian stock exchange at a share price of 46 euros. 3,098,000 shares were offered to investors of which 2,658,000 shares were created through a capital increase and the rest were sold by soru. soru made 20,240,000 euros on the ipo. in 2012, the price per share had plummeted to 0.04 euros. between 2001 and 2003, shares were also traded on the french stock exchange. ==services== each of tiscali's regional companies offer many services, which may include broadband internet access and telephone services. between 2007 and 2008, tiscali briefly operated an iptv service in italy (available in the cities of bologna, cagliari, florence, genoa, milan, naples, palermo, rome, turin and trieste). its uk television service, tiscali tv was acquired by talktalk in 2009. tiscali's former carrier company, tiscali international network, was a pure-play carrier business delivering wholesale services including global ip connectivity, mpls lines, voice over ip and network monitoring.[h
Companies_established_in_1998 Companies_listed_on_the_Borsa_Italiana Economy_of_Sardinia Internet_service_providers_of_Italy Italian_brands Telecommunications_companies_of_Italy