14 DAY TRIAL // A bit of a Nordic rivalry is heating up between Sweden and Finland, but a type of rivalry anyone can get behind of. Just a couple of weeks after Finland announced its plans to make broadband connections a legal right, Sweden is following suit with plans of its own. Regardless of whether it's national pride or a real necessity that needs addressing, Sweden is announcing its commitment to providing 90 percent of its population with a 100-megabits-per-second broadband connection by 2020.
The plans have been announced by none other than Åsa Torstensson, Sweden's infrastructure minister, who recognized the importance of the Internet and of a broadband connection in particular. "Although broadband access is generally good in Sweden, we still have thousands of households and enterprises with no access to broadband today. Sweden is a sparsely populated, elongated country... The need for broadband is as great in rural areas as in other parts of the country," she said, according to The Telegraph.
In fact, Sweden is one of the most connected countries in the world, with 89 percent of its population having an Internet connection with a guaranteed minimum of 20 kilobits per second, this despite the fact that large parts of the country are very remote and inaccessible. This is far from enough, it seems, and now the government is committed to significantly improving this by raising the minimum to 100 megabits by 2020 and making it available to at least 90 percent of the population. Furthermore, it wants at least 40 percent of the population to have access to this type of connections by 2015.
This move, though, isn't as ambitious as Finland's, which plans to make access to a 100-megabit connection a legal right for all citizens by 2015 with very few exceptions. It has even bigger plans for its capital, where it wants to have gigabit connections by that time. Of course, these plans don't actually provide the citizens with broadband connections, but just with the possibility to install one no matter where they live.