No Kaplan, it will not be "more bang for the buck".

Reading Mehmet Kaplan's statement in Svd today about the bill that will give "more bang for the buck" according to the minister and is honestly surprised. Of course it is positive that the responsible minister wants to make it cheaper to build broadband. A cost-effective expansion means that market investments reach further, i.e. that more people have the opportunity to connect to a future-proof digital infrastructure. The problem is that the law that Kaplan is referring to today, the implementation of the Roll-out Directive, will not contribute to this. Something I flagged already in March this year and which we were also very clear about in our consultation response to the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation in June.

In the consultation response, we stated that "It is doubtful whether the proposal in its current form will contribute to cheaper deployment in the coming years, or have any positive effect on the deployment by 2020. The risk is rather that the proposal, as a result of increased administrative burden and toothless obligations, will counteract the continued deployment and thus the digitization of Sweden".

Today's article says that the government "expects there to be some disputes". Yes, what they have calculated is that these disputes will cost SEK 20-25 million per year in the first few years. At the responsible authority, PTS, this would mean up to 20 full-time employees working solely on dispute resolution arising from this legislation. On top of this, there are also significant costs for the disputing parties and for the courts. And who is supposed to bear these costs? Broadband builders, of course.

It makes no sense - and is unlikely to be cheaper - that a law aimed at making development more cost-effective gives rise to an administrative colossus to be financed by those who are expected to invest in the infrastructure.

As I said, this, like the bill, is not news to the Minister. It is therefore surprising, to say the least, that Mehmet Kaplan once again claims that broadband expansion will become cheaper with the entry into force of this law next summer, when the actors who build broadband and who have expertise and experience in broadband expansion in practice do not believe that this legislation will have any positive effect on the expansion by 2020. "IT Minister promises cheap broadband to the whole country", says the newspaper today. Unfortunately, a very poorly substantiated political promise, I say.