Physical infrastructure access is likely to be part of the recipe to complete gigabit broadband deployment in Sweden, which only has rural areas left to cover
The PTS rules in favour of a municipality: The Swedish regulator, the PTS, ruled that energy provider E.ON will have to grant access to its physical infrastructure to a village association in the municipality of Sundsvall. The PTS resolved a dispute between the two parties, after E.ON originally denied the association access to its infrastructure. The company said its technical guidelines do not allow co-location on high-voltage poles. In reviewing the case, the PTS concluded there were no obstacles. The PTS believes that the association’s request was reasonable, and decided that E.ON must grant access on fair and reasonable terms.
Facilitating infrastructure access to cover rural areas: Sweden is one of the European countries with the highest fibre rollout. It only has a small percentage of premises left to cover, mainly located in areas that are the hardest to reach. The PTS noted in March that 95% of households and businesses had access to (or the opportunity to connect to) gigabit-capable broadband. Private broadband investment is now falling in Sweden, and the PTS believes this is a natural consequence of the fact that the premises left to cover are generally in unattractive areas for the market. Hence the ongoing broadband subsidy scheme, allocating SEK2.85bn (£240.7m) for the years 2020 to 2025, and the ‘Expansion Act’, which implements the EU Broadband Cost Reduction Directive and allows broadband providers to request access to other persons’ infrastructure to facilitate deployment.
Deploying fibre over power lines has worked elsewhere: The use of electricity infrastructure to deploy fibre has had some success recently. The Italian wholesale-only operator Open Fiber was initially a joint venture between a Government body and the national energy provider Enel, which used Enel’s infrastructure to deploy its fibre network. This has contributed to the recent growth in full fibre deployment in Italy, since OF has covered 2,400 municipalities so far, of which 2,200 are in ‘white areas’ (i.e. market failure areas) identified in the country’s broadband plan of 2015.
Source: https://pts.se/sv/nyheter/internet/2021/e.on-ska-ge-byaforening-tilltrade-till-infrastruktur/
