Stockholm is a world leader – again

Nearly ten years ago, Newsweek magazine picked Stockholm as the leading ICT capital in the world. A long article shone a spotlight on Sweden and Stockholm as a creative, competitive world leader. Newsweek attributed the Swedish ICT miracle to the fact that the Swedes were early adopters of telephones, mobile phones and the Internet.

A lot has happened since the Newsweek article. We’ve gotten broadband, and begun blogging and Twittering. YouTube, Facebook and Apple have redesigned the playing field, changing our communication behavior in a way we couldn’t have predicted ten years ago.

But we don’t hear as much about the Swedish ICT miracle these days. Certainly Sweden is still viewed as a leading country, but it’s not receiving the same chorus of praises from the rest of the world as it did at the end of the 90s, before the IT bubble burst.

On December 14 Telia rolled out the world’s first 4G network in Stockholm. The new network takes mobile broadband usage to a totally new level, with speeds up to ten times higher than current mobile broadband speeds.

The 4G rollout has received worldwide attention. A column in the Washington Post noted that “Scandinavia always gets everything first when it comes to mobile,” and suggests that people who want to enjoy the new technology should move to Stockholm. International research firm IDC’s remark upon the 4G rollout was that “this takes the Nordic region to the cutting edge of the wireless revolution; this is a remarkable achievement.”

This opens entirely new opportunities for Stockholm and to the people living here . 4G makes it possible to use services that demand more capacity such as web TV, videoconferencing, or working with large files and applications in the same way as with fixed broadband, regardless of location.

Meanwhile a change in behavior is developing, driven by virtualization and digitization, creating completely new demands for accessibility. We want to communicate regardless of time and place. We want to be efficient and environmentally friendly. Things should be fast, simple and secure. 4G meets these needs for new ways to work and socialize, and in the long term possibilities will open up that we can’t even really imagine today, as little as we could have predicted that “Google” would become a verb. But it’s here in Stockholm that this exciting journey begins.

The world’s first 4G network gives us everything necessary to become a world-class ICT region. Soon it will be time for Newsweek to do a new piece on Stockholm.

Jan Pettersson
Sales Director, TeliaSonera