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Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started... The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where

Looking back to the mid-to-late 90s, when this all started... The government was all in, very early on. There was this giant tax deduction scheme in 1998 where every employed person had this opportunity to buy a computer to get online at like half price, since all the taxes (income tax, employment tax) were waived. I used that scheme to buy an outrageous $5k PC at "half price". (Dual Pentium 333 Mhz, Dual Voodoo2 - those are the specs I remember.) Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early. In parallel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bredbandsbolaget was started, with the goal of providing high bandwidth connections to people. Cisco invested very, very heavily into this company, as well as a bunch of american pension funds. When I moved into an apartment in a mid-sized city in 2000, it had a 10 Mbit/s ethernet socket. I heard they invested so heavily, putting $1M routers into the basements of like 20-30 apartment buildings. Maybe that's why we got upgraded without an extra charge to 100 Mbit/s just a few years later. (It's now 250 Mbit/s, and we're still just paying $7/apartment/month in our co-op.) It pains me a little to do so, but I credit the late 1990s social democratic government for the foresight to create the market by basically flooding the country with tax-free PCs. And, oh, yeah, there was a lot of proactive fibre-laying going on, very early. Not quite sure how what happened. That backstory is probably quite important...

Moru 7y ago
It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.
ckris 7y ago
In Stockholm it was decided to connect all public housing, which was ~25% of the housing stock at the time. Owned apartments being coops, and presumably being able to make majority decisions, probably helped as well. That said, I don't think it is that impressive these days. Most digital or infrastructure things are very "1.5" compared to for example some parts of Asia.
kalleboo 7y ago
> Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early. From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.

Moru 7y ago

It was a lot about people interested in the domain. For example our local power company was tasked with digging down the central heating pipes in the whole town. One of the workers managed to talk management to pull fiber alongside the hotwater pipes between every house. Most of the town had central heating connected and together with that came the fiber. The town bought the fiber network a few years later.

ckris 7y ago

In Stockholm it was decided to connect all public housing, which was ~25% of the housing stock at the time. Owned apartments being coops, and presumably being able to make majority decisions, probably helped as well. That said, I don't think it is that impressive these days. Most digital or infrastructure things are very "1.5" compared to for example some parts of Asia.

kalleboo 7y ago

> Telia, the former Swedish monopoly telephony company did a surprisingly good job at bringing ADSL to people, quite early. From my corner of Sweden, the privatization of Telia was what helped us - Skanova (the company formed to hold all of Telia's old copper assets) was required to upgrade any phone switching station to ADSL as long as someone would pay for it, so there were a bunch of rural ISPs formed that would do the legwork to gather enough customers to pay for small switching stations to be upgraded that Telia deemed unprofitable.