Why is it best to live in Nordic countries as an internet user?

In this time of massive digitalization, it’s pretty much unimaginable to live a life without having an internet connection. Whether you’re working in services, production, or agriculture, the chances are high that you’re using online resources to promote your work, communicate with customers, and acquire new materials for production.

But work isn’t the only part of our life massively dependent on the internet. When we want to relax and spend some time outside of work, what do we do? As a famous internet meme goes, “keep calm and Netflix!” Movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, music, games - everything depends on the internet nowadays. We can even get in touch with our relatives and friends over the cloud - especially in these crazy times of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Broadband speed disparity across the world

Now, depending on which part of the world you live in, the fixed broadband connection speeds will be different for you. For example, as the Speedtest report for Scandinavian countries from 2016 (Speedtest doesn’t have more recent data on this region) indicates, the average download speeds for Sweden was around 72 Megabits per second, 64 Mbps for Denmark, 52 Mbps for Norway, and 36 Mbps for Finland.

Now, we’re using Speedtest’s data because this agency has been around for quite a while in the internet monitoring industry and has gained quite a bit of reputation in the meanwhile. Therefore, the data gathered from Scandinavia can be directly compared to other regions and countries. And as the comparison shows, Scandinavian countries have much faster internet than, say, the United States, where the average broadband connection speed was at 55 Mbps, almost 20 Mbps less than in Sweden and 10 Mbps less than Denmark.

What’s more, we also have more recent results from Panda Security, which is a bit counter-intuitive because it shows that the connection speeds in 2019 were considerably slower than in 2016. For this reason of being somewhat illogical, we’re only going to note that even in here, Sweden and Denmark are on the top five (third place for Sweden at 55 Mbps and fourth for Denmark at 49 Mbps) of the fastest broadband networks, while the US doesn’t even get to the top ten - it is on the twelfth place at a 33 Mbps average connection speed.

Advantages of using Scandinavian internet, other than its speed

Sweden

There are many other advantages of being an internet user in Scandinavia, and especially in Sweden. First and foremost, the Swedish government has no internet surveillance whatsoever. There are no web monitoring mechanisms, no restrictions on speech, social media, or news agencies, and uses net neutrality as the main method of guaranteeing fairness within the network.

Norway

Also in Norway, the same freedoms can be found as in Sweden, although the government is a bit stricter on online providers, having set up a milder version of the web surveillance system. And there is quite a straightforward explanation of why that is so: there are many online providers in Norway that tend to have fraudulent intentions, including online trading and gambling operators.

Gambling, in particular, is an important industry in Norway that the government has taken into its own hands. Currently, there are two governmental entities that monitor and conduct online gambling activities in the country. Therefore, if the new casinos online in Norway want to register as online gambling providers, they need to go through the guidelines and requirements imposed by those institutions.

One advantage of online gamers over the brick-and-mortar casino-goers in Norway is that the country allows people to gamble online, but does not allow companies to directly promote their services to locals. The real casino halls are simply banned. Therefore, internet resources can be fully optimized by online punters in Norway.

Denmark

The average internet speeds are also very high in Denmark, as we noted earlier. In fact, the country has the second-fastest broadband internet connections in the region after Sweden. However, just like Norway, Denmark also has some sort of web surveillance system that is designed to protect Danish citizens from unlawful online entities.

Underlying causes of fast connectivity in Scandinavia

It is no coincidence that the Scandinavian countries have one of the best internet services in the world right now. For providing the best connectivity to the active online users, the governments of Sweden, Norway, and others alongside the internet providers have declared it their goal to cover the whole region with the most sophisticated infrastructure available on the market.

Sweden, for example, has been continuously ranking among the top five, or at least the top ten in terms of having the most fiber network subscribers than anywhere else. Besides, the city of Stockholm is one of the rarest ones in the world that supports a stable 5G network that ramps up its speed at more than a Gigabyte per second.

In Finland, the world saw the very first case of the government declaring internet access as a legal right for every citizen. Therefore, whether you’re low on your budget or living in a luxurious villa, you’ll have the basic internet connection anyway. But the basic broadband connection isn’t the most popular type of network in the country as more than 95% of the population is constantly using the 4G mobile internet.

So, this all goes to show how Scandinavian countries dominate the internet industry. Now, this is not to say that other regions and countries are drastically different in this sense. For example, the South-Eastern region of Asia and the countries like Taiwan and Singapore are already on the number one and two positions in the network connection speeds in the world.