28 Jul 2011Sweden Broadband Overview

Prior to 1993 the Swedish state controlled incumbent was the public service corporation Televerket. Although the Swedish market has never protected a legal monopoly, Televerket was for a long time the only provider of public voice telecommunications services in Sweden. In 1993, the government transformed Televerket from a state-owned public utility into a limited company and changed its name to Telia AB. In June 2000, the Swedish state sold 30 per cent of Telia shares in an initial public offering.

In December 2002, Telia merged with Finnish telco Sonera to form TeliaSonera. The merger brought together two of the leading telecom operators in Scandinavia and resulted in the formation of a leading telecommunications group in the Nordic and Baltic regions with strong market positions also in Eurasia, Russia and Turkey. In Q2 2007, the Swedish government sold an 8 per cent stake in TeliaSonera to institutional investors for SEK 18 billion.

In recent years Sweden enjoyed rapid broadband expansion. Sweden is the leading country in Europe in terms of broadband quality and is rapidly catching up with Japan and South Korea. Sweden’s Broadband Quality Score improved from 83 in 2008 to 104 in 2010. In 2010 the main areas of growth were fibre networks and mobile broadband.

Wireless broadband and broadband via fixed networks (xDSL) are available to almost the entire territory with 83 per cent of residents covered in rural areas and 97 per cent in urban areas. Fibre access and, to an even great extent, broadband through cable networks, is concentrated in larger urban areas. Rural areas in northern Sweden in particular have poor access to fixed broadband. A third of small and medium-sized businesses in these areas have dial-up access, while the equivalent proportion for the whole of Sweden is 2 per cent. It is estimated that almost 88 per cent of those living in rural areas can have wireless broadband access but there are fewer operators and networks offering wireless services. In more remote areas, obstacles to getting broadband coverage range from “difficult” landscape (mountains, forests, valleys) to interferences with radio signals and high deployment costs.

Recently, Sweden witnessed a technology shift. The number of broadband subscriptions based on fibre and mobile technology is continuing to grow, while the share of DSL, the technology that previously drove a large proportion of broadband growth, is falling. The shift is partly caused by increasing demand for higher speeds. The proportion of broadband lines with speeds of at least 10 Mbps continues to rise and at end-2010 stood at 70 per cent of all broadband subscriptions. The number of subscriptions with a transmission capacity of at least 100 Mbps downstream on 31 December 2010 amounted to 163,000. This corresponds to 8 per cent of the households in Sweden that have the possibility of using broadband with at least 100 Mbps speeds.

During 2010 the really big breakthrough occurred for mobile broadband. The total number of mobile broadband subscriptions, with add-on packages included, is now almost as high as that of fixed broadband subscriptions. Another long-term trend is that an increasingly large proportion of the traffic has become IP based. Traditional fixed and mobile telephony still dominate, but within fixed telephony, IP-based alternatives had already established themselves a few years ago and they continue to grow. A shift in technology will also take place with respect to mobile telephony. This is because the new networks using LTE technology (4G) are pure data networks where call services will be IP-based.