Bredbandsbolaget

» see bredbandsbolaget.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Ten megabits in each direction, into a flat, for around two hundred kronor a month, which in 1999 was half what a cable modem cost in Stockholm. The line I dialed in Turkey that year ran at 33.6k, roughly three hundred times slower. The offer read like a dispatch from another planet.

Bredbandsbolaget began in the summer of 1998 as B2, a spin-off from Framtidsfabriken, the consultancy everybody called Framfab, and became a company in its own right in May 1999. Jonas Birgersson was the founder and the public face of it, promising to wire the country at a moment when the market wanted exactly that promise. The pilot network went into Sundbyberg and was valued at 75 million kronor.

The money arrived the way money arrived then. NTL agreed to take a quarter of the company in 1999, Carlyle and Investor came in through a share issue that June, and in 2001 another 230 million dollars went in from the owners already there. Telenor agreed to buy the whole company on 21 May 2005 and closed on 8 July for about six billion kronor. Bredbandsbolaget had more than 340,000 broadband customers at that point, after ranking as the second largest provider in Sweden in 2003.

Then came thirteen years that almost nobody writes about. Telenor kept the name running as a separate brand beside its own, sharing an organization underneath, and kept selling under it. At the end the brand still had over 475,000 connected households and more than 200,000 subscribers on broadband telephony, third in the country behind Com Hem and Telia, turning over around 2.5 billion kronor in 2017 at an operating profit of 305.6 million.

On 15 May 2018 the name stopped. Bredbandsbolaget AB merged into Telenor Sverige AB, the two brands were folded into one, and Glocalnet went into the same box on the same day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what ten megabits meant ~

B2 ran fiber to the apartment building and ethernet up the stairwell to the door, so the connection was symmetric and always on while most of Europe was still dialing. Symmetric mattered more than the headline number. Ten megabits upstream in 1999 meant somebody in a flat could serve files to the rest of the world as fast as they received them, which almost nobody else in Europe could do from home.

That build model also explains where the money went. Every building had to be dug to and wired before it earned a single krona, and the company spent the whole bubble raising capital to keep digging.

~ the redirect ~

bredbandsbolaget.se still answers. It returns a permanent redirect to the broadband page on telenor.se, and the URL it lands on still carries a campaign tag reading bredbandsbolaget, so somebody at Telenor is still counting the people who type the old name into a browser eight years later. The domain never went to a broker. It went into the acquirer's analytics and stayed there.

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