Socio-economic Impact of Fiber to the Home in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) has been talked about since the introduction of fiberin the 1970s. It is nowadays shaping up to be the foundation of our newdigital society, bringing economic prosperity and a multitude of business,social, and entertainment opportunities to its users. The increased consumerdemand for high-speed network accessibility is being taken more and moreseriously and a fiber-based network is able to cope with these growing demandsdue to its wide bandwidth and reliability. Today there is a practical need forquantitative analysis regarding the socio-economic impacts of fiber-basedaccess networks. This analysis could be used as an indicator/reference for allthe stakeholder entities as they consider future investments anddevelopments. Sweden is a suitable target country for this analysis since ithas adopted fiber for some years and the benefits that FTTH has brought seemto already be tangible. The primary value of this thesis lies ininvestigation of its quantified evidence of the socio-economic impacts of FTTHdeployment in Sweden. This has been achieved based on data from the SwedishPost and Telecommunications Authority (PTS), Statistics Sweden (SCB), previousrelated studies, and information collected on-line from operators involved inthe fiber market, along with empirical analysis based on multivariateregression models. The results of the study show that fiber penetrationhas had a significant impact on the population’s evolution, specially the netamount of migration into a municipality, which indicates the attractiveness ofmunicipalities per se. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that localgovernment and local authorities take fiber deployment into consideration, ifthey want to attract people to stay for further local development. The studyalso analyzed the competition in fiber-based open networks and the prices ofsubscribing for 10/10 Mbps symmetrical Internet Service. Study findingsrevealed that networks with multiple competing service providers have a widerrange of services and a lower price: the more ISPs competing in a fibernetwork, the lower consumer prices. Specifically, for each new serviceprovider present in the network, there will be 5 SEK per month decrease of theaverage price of the Internet services, and an approximately 7 SEK per monthreduction in the lowest price. Nevertheless, a number of socio-economicimpacts remain unquantifiable as of the current time and due to the limitedavailable data. It is recommended to incorporate more socio-economic effectsin future research in order to draw a more complete picture for all theinterested sectors, and to supplement the data with recent figures for 2012and 2013.