> dense are the places where people live). Sweden has large sparsely-populated areas, but almost the whole population is clustered in a handful of major cities. The Stockholm metro area has a quarter of the entire country's population
Obviously large cities in all countries will have high speed broadband. A better measure of broadband penetration is probably to look outside cities.
Perhaps surprisingly, fiber is often built from "the outside in" in Sweden, due to subsidies. Dense areas such as cities obviously have a lot of choice, but after that the places that got (and keep getting) fiber are remote and very sparsely populated areas. The thinking (I'm assuming) is that medium density places such as suburbs will be getting fiber by market forces, and already have choices such as DSL in the meantime - so the vast subsidies to pull fiber to every remote cottage is focusing on the really remote areas such as small islands, small remote villages etc.
So contrary to what one might think, Sweden now has fiber in many of the lowest density areas such as remote houses in the Stockholm archipelago
Obviously large cities in all countries will have high speed broadband. A better measure of broadband penetration is probably to look outside cities. Perhaps surprisingly, fiber is often built from "the outside in" in Sweden, due to subsidies. Dense areas such as cities obviously have a lot of choice, but after that the places that got (and keep getting) fiber are remote and very sparsely populated areas. The thinking (I'm assuming) is that medium density places such as suburbs will be getting fiber by market forces, and already have choices such as DSL in the meantime - so the vast subsidies to pull fiber to every remote cottage is focusing on the really remote areas such as small islands, small remote villages etc.
So contrary to what one might think, Sweden now has fiber in many of the lowest density areas such as remote houses in the Stockholm archipelago