Telia to cover 2.3m fibre homes, including 1m Swedish

Stockholm-based TeliaSonera has announced a target of covering one million homes in Sweden with direct fibre broadband connections and a further 1.3 million households in Nordic and Baltic countries by the end of 2014. The Swedish group’s CEO Lars Nyberg disclosed that TeliaSonera has earmarked SEK5 billion (USD790 million) for rolling out fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) infrastructure in its domestic market in 2011-2014, while an additional SEK3 billion is expected to be invested for the same purpose in Finland, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database notes that Telia previously set a higher goal of providing between 1.5 million and two million households and enterprises across Sweden with access speeds of between 30Mbps and 100Mbps ‘by 2011’. However, because of an ongoing series of disagreements with the telecoms regulator, the PTS, over how wholesale access to its fibre network should be regulated, the telco has held off from entering into the full-blooded national rollout of direct fibre. Whilst Telia’s strategy on deploying FTTP infrastructure has remained, by its own admission, ‘very cautious’, in March 2010 Ericsson undertook a contract to roll out VDSL2 equipment for one million user connections across the group’s operations in Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which had a scheduled completion time of twelve months.