Sweden’s support for muni fibre.
Sweden remains one of the world’s leading countries for fibre deployment. By early 2009 fibre accounted for 15% of all broadband subscriptions, and there were close to 600,000 subscribers nationally.
A number of factors have encouraged fibre deployment. A significant proportion of the population live in apartment buildings within the three largest conurbations, and given the cheaper costs incurred these areas were among the first to be covered by fibre. A large number of Swedes also live in small towns and villages, many now being served by muni fibre. Operators have been able to bear the additional cost of building networks in semi-urban environments because take-up among customers is sufficiently strong, while in the more rural areas Swedes have been able to perform much of the civil engineering (digging trenches) themselves.
Numerous networks open to a range of content and service providers have been built by organisations other than telcos, including municipalities, regional governments, housing associations and local utilities. Swedish municipal broadband has successfully adopted the ‘stadsnätt’ urban area network model, by which a city builds and administers fibre infrastructure which is then rented at cost price to service providers which set up their own transmission equipment. In Stockholm more than 30 organisations have built their facilities through the municipality’s open fibre network, operated by Stokab.
On a broader level, the country’s IP infrastructure depends on several tiers at the municipal, regional and national levels. The model is based on a national backbone serving incrementally smaller localities (at the level of schools, hospitals, municipalities, universities etc) with end-users then being connected to the network through homeowner associations.
Since 1998 the effective coordination of these different tiers of infrastructure and the various players involved in fibre development has been largely undertaken by a non-profit trade association, the Swedish Urban Network Association (SSNf). The SSNf has about a hundred members, including local authorities and companies which own or operate open networks. Given the complexity and costs of fibre builds, the co-operative efforts managed by the SSNf (not least to reduce overall capex and enable operators to learn from the experiences and models of other players) is swiftly creating a fibre infrastructure which benefits the country as a whole, not just the target areas of individual companies. This cooperative enterprise has set Sweden apart from most other markets, where recent progress in fibre deployment has depended more on government stimuli (funding and sympathetic regulatory treatments) than on commercial considerations.
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