Drool. Swedish high-speed broadband provider Bredbandsbolaget sells 100-megabit-per-second service for 595 Swedish crowns ($79.49) a month in areas where the state of wiring infrastructure permits. Over 1,500 households have already signed up. In the US, $79 might buy you, say, a 3.0 Mbps DSL connection. Higher-speed forms of connectivity are available in many parts of the US, but that’s a common speed-per-buck equation. And it compared to Sweden, it blows.
For Rainer Kinnunen, life has been a bit of a blur since he signed up for a superhigh-speed Internet service three years ago. The 31-year-old Swedish student’s computer has supplanted the television as the most vital link between his home and the outside world. He watches television shows and movies, makes phone calls, surfs the Web and plays multiplayer shoot-’em-up games through his high-speed connection — often doing one or more activities at once.
His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours. For Kinnunen, the result has been a lifestyle change that, though not revolutionary, is certainly noticeable. “If my child wants a movie, I can download it instantly,” he said. “And I haven’t been to the neighborhood music store in years.”
Since going superhigh-speed, Kinnunen has set up two computer servers in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb of Eskilstuna. One supplies his digital photos to friends and family. On the other, he duels it out for hours a day with other players of the “Half-Life: Day of Defeat” online war game. And he has enough bandwidth and server space left over to broadcast his DVDs from his apartment to his friends’ computers in case they want to watch along from across town.