The Swedish
Telecommunications Market, our summary of operator statistics, seldom provides
any great surprises. Still, each year I find a few new tendencies or a few
unexpected breaks in trends. The most interesting part is seeing the statistics
from a long-term perspective. This provides a picture of how much has actually
happened in the market.
Five years
ago, fixed telephony represented an overwhelming proportion of the voice
traffic in the networks. During the last four years, the proportion of voice
traffic in mobile networks has risen at an increasing rate, while the number of
fixed traffic minutes has reduced. I believe that I can dare to promise that in
a year there will be as many traffic minutes in mobile networks as in fixed
networks.
A common
feature for the new services that have emerged and been most successful during
recent years is that they are based on existing solutions. A large step was
taken when the traditional copper network became a broadband network.
Thereafter, the IP-based networks became the bearer of voice telephony and
television services and, with the impact of ‘turbo 3G’,
mobile networks also became broadband networks.
Developments
show that there are two consumer needs that currently power the development of
services – needs for high capacity and mobility. Swedes are choosing broadband
with high capacity to an increasingly great extent, not least owing to the fact
that services such as IPTV impose great demands on the networks. At the same
time, the strong development of mobile broadband shows that we also wish to
have access to services outside the home.
This year’s
report contains an area of focus which illustrates this development well,
namely ‘cloud services’ or cloud computing. When we place our programs and our
information on the Internet instead of our computer, we can gain access to the
information regardless of our location. We can use smaller terminals, for
example small laptop computers, since computer capacity becomes less important.
However, demands on the capacity of the networks increase at the same time as
security and privacy – how our information is dealt with – becomes more
important. The mobile society has been spoken of for a long time as a vision. I
wish to state that in many aspects we are already there.
For the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS), the development I have described above represents new challenges. Capacity and mobility require investments in networks, both mobile and fixed. As the regulatory authority, we have the important task of creating the preconditions for effective investments and sustainable competition. With clear game rules, the market stakeholders can devote resources to offering new and improved services so that in five years we will be able to look back on a period that is as revolutionary as the one I have surveyed here.
Marianne Treschow
Director-General