Slashdot Mirror
Why Is Connectivity So Cheap In Stockholm?
lpress writes "Symmetric, 100 Mbps service in Stockholm, costs $11/month. Conditions in every city are different, but part of the explanation for the low cost is that the city owns a municipal fiber network reaching every block. They lease network access to anyone who would like to offer service. The ISPs, including incumbent telephone and cable companies, compete on an equal footing."
My first thought was that because the city owns the entire network, much of the reason for the low cost is self-explanatory. But then I imagined if a similar arrangement were formed in the US, I would be extremely surprised if the same prices were attained. Local governments would likely see this as a source of income and either charge a similar rate to competitors, or possibly undercut their neighbors by a narrow margin in order to appear generous and possibly gain a few extra votes for the incumbents. Does anybody know more particulars of this arrangement and local laws in the area? Is the portion of the Stockholm government that runs this program have any sort of "no-profit" legislation?
Stokab is a municipal owned company that runs most of the cables in the Stockholm area. Fiber is cheap to own and most of the conducts was already built for other utilities. The bedrock of Stockholm is solid granite and easy to tunnel.
There is no subsidized on the cable costs. The difference is the pay back time on the cable. Stokab probably have calculated a payback time equally the life time of the cable (20 years or more). And because they regularly have to replace there other cable infrastructure adding a few new cables isn't that expensive when the crew is in place.
Another factor that reduce the cost is that most of Stockholm have district heating with concrete ducts that run all over the city. In those conducts there is easy to have an RC robot laying cable besides the existing pipes.
By selling the fiber and black fiber telcos and other are renting fiber from Stokab instead of putting there own in the ground. That is also an factor that reduces the costs for the ISP.
My ISP (Bahnhof.se , of late ./ fame) runs part of there subscriber network in Stokab fibers.
I don't think we'll see this in US. I work for a network equipment provider and we do xDSL and FTTH. Even when our customers deploy fiber technology, they still limit the pipe. With video becoming more prominent, they'll have to increase the bandwidth. However, the only advancement we'll see is if there were more players as opposed to only one or two choices.
It really comes down to the fact that last mile connectivity is pretty much a natural monopoly(not quite as severe as roads; but pretty much on par with water and power).
For reasons that, I assume, have to do with a mixture of lobbying by incumbents and a strong distrust of "socialism" we've mostly been denying this fact for years.
It is a simple matter of empirical fact that free markets work pretty well. However, when you are dealing with natural monopolies, free markets aren't really an option, so that is irrelevant. The choice is pretty much between (ill) regulated monopoly and municipal ownership. Frankly, municipal ownership is likely the better choice. I know that I have way, way less trouble with my water service than with my phone service or ISP.
The U.S. should use an infrastructure already in place. Pipe fiber through residential gas lines. It's only light traveling across the line so it shouldn't ignite the fuel.
No, that's Norway.
Finland has the world's best Punk bands.
Germany provides the best Heavy Metal artists.
In all three cases, I think the native languages lend themselves well to the success of these genres.
Sweden has.... choir singing and ABBA.
Connectivity in Sweden is no cheap at all. You're asking two different things here. Most swedes have fast broadband on the cost of shared bandwidth. They order 100mbit and its usually 4-6MB/s. That being said, its probably a lot better than in USA etc. Premium, guaranteed bandwidth in sweden costs a lot more than for example in usa or france. Even if you order 100mbit you're still limited to like 200GB/month or similar. Go over that and you pay really a premium price for it.
Guaranteed 100Mbps for corporate subscribers in Stockholm costs around USD 810 (SEK 7000) without any caps. How much does that kind of bandwidth cost in the US and France? Btw, I've had two residential 100Mbps connections. I might just be lucky, but at our old place north of Stockholm and at our new place, we're consistently able to achieve downloads at around 8MB/sec from TechNet.
Yes, I am Swedish.
We don't debate "socialism v.s. capitalism" in contemporary politics. We debate "security v.s. real jobs".
One book that looks at both of those countries specifially is P.J. O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich." P.J.O'R is certainly "conservative" (actually, quite libertarian in most aspects, I think, which is why I've just scare-quoted that word) and could I think be called a free-market evangelist, but I don't think political orientation of any sort would be a sticking point in finding the chapters in which he describes and contrasts Sweden and Cuba interesting / informative / enjoyable.
I don't have the book in front of me to quote, but it's recent enough and high-selling enough it shouldn't be too hard to find, if you're in the U.S.
You'll also find plenty of Sweden and Cuba mentions in the podcasts at econtalk.org; for instance, this one: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/10/bernstein_on_in.html
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, when the party that has ruled Sweden for most of the past century and still has the most voters is called the "social democrats" I think you can have a guess how "taboo" socialism is here. It is true we are a mixed economy however. The main difference to places like the US is that we don't pretend to be capitalist. We have a reasonably free market with necessary regulations that is complemented with a comprehensive welfare state. Oh, and over here "liberal" is something you accuse politicians of NOT being, as opposed to the surreal American situation where you're apparently pro freedom but anti liberty. Doublethink at its finest.
Are you kidding me? I myself is currently in Stockholm on a 100/100 Mbit connection from the company Bredband2. Almost all broadband connections are unmetered in Sweden (some mobile ones excluded) and I get around 11.4/10.8 MB in actual download/upload speed.
There were some problems with speeds on some *dsl lines years ago, but since The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency released an opensource bandwidth tester with an online version, reports about speeds are spread quickly. The largest cable modem operator have also just upgraded to 50/10 Mbit ($40).
The price on the other hand is somewhat wrong, because it depends on which network you are on. I'm on OpenNet which seems to be one of the more expensive ones and the price is more like $35/month. I can choose from about ten different providers.
Why do you think all the news from Sweden is about filesharing (The Pirate Bay, The Pirate Party, The Pirate Bureau) of course it's because the broadbands connections are slow and capped...NOT
There's lot of BS going on about Sweden here today. Swedens debt used to be exactly the same as the USA relative GDP, 80%. That was some time ago. We have been paying for that quite some time and the debt is down to 40% of GDP though it is rising, but so is USAs. We pay the highest taxes, some public services work, many (such as law enforcement) do not. We have practically not created a single new enterprise for the last 50 years. It's all pre-war and disappearing one by one (please understand that I'm not talking seven-eleven or McDonald's here). The lack of privately held venture capital makes all capital institutionalized and there's really no risk taking going on. Brilliant Swedes go abroad, to the US for example (figure that).
If you wanted to, say, watch HD movies over the internet regularly, you could certainly manage to use up 200GB in a month. I am sure other people could come up with other reasonable ways to use up that much bandwidth. Remember that Comcast's cap is higher at 250GB on a much slower connection.
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/77/The_income_taxes_people_really_pay.html
"The average production worker in Sweden pays no income tax at all to the central government."
The personal exemption is a tenth higher that the average income. So unless you are doing better than most your taxes are in the form of sales tax and other flat taxes or fixed fees.
Whats all this talk about "guaranteed" bandwidth?
If you pay for something it should be guaranteed anyway, otherwise the merchant is a fraud.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Where do you get that idea? In Sweden you are eligible to get your money back. The goverment even has a site set up where you can test your bandwidth. It is true that the bandwidth is shared so that not everyone can use all their bandwidth at the same time. But this is the same with electrical power. If everyone, or even a large share, in a neighbourhood drew as much current as their main fuses permitts the fuses of the nearet transformer would blow