Google Puts Focus on the City of Stockholm’s Fiber Deployment
The model Stockholm has chosen when it comes to providing an operator-neutral dark fiber network, has increased the city’s attractiveness and enabled companies, organizations and the city itself to operate more efficiently. This is stated by Benoit Felten, Chief Research Officer at Diffraction Analysis, in a report commissioned by Google on Stockholm’s IT infrastructure company Stokab.
We contacted Anders Broberg, Stokab’s Public Information Officer:
The report concludes that Stokab – directly and indirectly – has contributed in making Stockholm a more attractive city for businesses in general and the tech sector in particular. What are the best examples in your opinion?
- Partly thanks to great internet connectivity we have many interesting, innovative
start-up companies in Stockholm. The fiber network has made the roll-out of
LTE easy – today we have four LTE operators in Stockholm. Also, with no lack of fiber, you can innovate like SVT (the Swedish public service television company); SVT has replaced their OB-trucks with fibre. They connect the cameras via fiber in the streets to the control room.
From a citizen perspective, what is the main benefit of having a city owned passive fiber infrastructure?
- Citizens get an increased freedom of choice when operator-neutral fiber allows several Internet service providers to compete towards the same end customer. This and other benefits is realized without any tax money.
Today, how many of the citizens and businesses in the City of Stockholm are or can potentially be connected [via an operator] to the Internet with Stokab’s fiber network?
- Today, office buildings that covers 90 % of Stockholm’s companies have fibre-optic networks from Stokab; and, buildings that covers 80 % of the households have a fibre-optic network. At the end of 2012, that figure will have risen to nearly 100 % and 90 % respectively.
Disclaimer: Stokab is a member of Stockholm IT Region
