TeliaSonera to offer 100Mbps FTTB in Orebro County

TeliaSonera Sweden and local government officials have signed a letter of intent to roll out fibre broadband internet access services to households and businesses in all towns with more than 200 residents in Orebro County. TeliaSonera expects to offer download speeds of up to 100Mbps over fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) connections throughout the county ‘in the near future’, to support bandwidth-intensive services such as multiple IPTV services, HDTV, online gaming and CAD/CAM applications. Grythyttan in the Municipality of Hallefors is the first town scheduled to receive the new service by the end of February 2008; pre-orders will be taken in December with FTTB connections costing SEK4,000 (USD633) per property, valid until the end of March 2008. End-user customers in Grythyttan will initially be offered a triple-play package of 10Mbps internet connection, eleven digital TV channels and voice telephony for SEK224 per month, with video-on-demand services also available for extra one-off fees. According to the incumbent telco’s letter of intent, more than 60 towns in Orebro will have access to the ‘superfast’ broadband network. The county already has well-developed fibre network infrastructure, which has been partly built via funding from the national government. Since fibre-optic lines have been laid to all telecom exchanges in the county, the distance to reach each customer is relatively small. TeleGeography notes that TeliaSonera is likely to announce further local government partnerships in the short-to-medium term, as it revealed earlier this year that it is intent on expanding its service coverage over municipal fibre broadband networks; its website currently advertises internet access over more than 25 of the ‘Stadsnat’ urban fibre/LAN/DSL networks in twelve counties. It has also struck agreements to supply FTTB to new-build projects and existing buildings with at least five large construction and real estate companies in Sweden.