Swedish plans leave Digital Britain trailing

It's easy to critisize but....

On the face of it Sweden's plans seem to be significantly more ambitious than the UK's, and seem to put its 2mb connection plan to shame, but once you take at the wider situation in detail you will see that Sweden's task is much easier and much simpler.

Sweden has a population only marginally bigger than London, and it's population distribution and land issues means that laying fiber to most large population centers is far easier than doing the same thing in the UK because there are fewer roads to dig up, less private commercial and residential land to traverse, and the average distance form the local exchange is also likely to be less in Sweden than in the UK because of their population distribution. Sweden can also complete quite a bit of its task simply by running new cables while the UK has to maintain legacy systems alongside new cables, and then to manage the switch over.

This means that it's far cheaper to connect people, and that every significant piece of infrastructure that you invest in will reach more people in Sweden than in the UK.

Comparing broadband plans in Britain and Sweden is like comparing rolling out broadband to a small town to plumbing broadband into short street.

By Perfectblue97 on 4 Nov 2009

Well, yes but the essential fact is that in Sweden they still have very high taxes which are spent by the government EFFICIENTLY. In Britain we have two political options and both are equally devastating for the public finance system. If Sweden is generally socialist than Britain is Orewllian. Mostly Animal Farm-ish.

By Josefov on 4 Nov 2009

Smaller population doesn't mean better value per person, that's working against the economy of scale.

Unfortunately, we see more and more companies in UK busy with rewarding executives with big bonuses than doing real work and delivering real values to consumers.

Our Government needs to wake up, nuff said.

By zeevro on 4 Nov 2009

@Perfectblue97

You've missed the small matter of landmass - Sweden has an area of 173,732 sq mi compared to the 94,526 sq mi that make up the UK - and Sweden has only 5 towns/cities with a population of 100,000 or more, compared to 65 in the UK. It makes wiring up towns much easier but there's far more that needs to run for long distances without connecting to anyone.

As Sweden will have to run far more fibre cables than the UK to serve 1/6th of the population, it's clearly less cost-effective to roll out fibre in Sweden - so it makes the UK Government's 2MB/s commitment nothing short of pathetic.

I'd also argue that laying fibre underwater is far more difficult than digging up roads - and Stockholm being situated on several islands will raise costs significantly.

By thewelshbrummie on 4 Nov 2009