Apartment dwellers can expect a significant additional bill on top of the expensive renovation

Fresh the EU regulation on broadband networks may cause a noticeable decrease for the residents of apartment buildings and townhouses.

The EU’s gigabit regulation tightens the requirements for indoor networks in buildings. The regulation aims to speed up the construction of high-speed fiber optic networks, so that Europeans have access to connections operating at at least a gigabit speed by 2030.

The regulation entered into force in 2024, and it began to be applied on November 12 in Finland and other member countries. It is the applicable legislation in the member countries as such. In Finland, national legislation supplementing the regulation is currently being considered by the parliament. Parliament is expected to approve it at the turn of the year.

Special expert of the Ministry of Transport and Communications Sofia Lindbäck says that the gigabit regulation obliges apartment buildings and townhouses to upgrade their indoor network to a fiber network if the property undergoes a basic repair that requires a building permit, such as plumbing or electrical repair.

The old legislation obliged to build a network connection with a speed of at least 30 megabits per second. The EU regulation increases the obligation to 1,000 megabits per second.

The national legislation is supposed to make the obligation a little easier, i.e. fiber network would not need to be built in small houses or summer apartments.

Real estate association senior legal expert Tapio Haltia estimates that the gigabit regulation does not change the requirements very much from the previous ones.

According to the regulation of the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, building societies have had to renew their internal networks to fiber networks in connection with extensive renovations.

The housing company has previously been able to avoid renewing the internal network if it has demonstrated the adequacy of the internal network’s capacity by measuring. The gigabit setting removes this possibility.

in Finland In recent years, optical fiber has been dug into the ground intensively for apartment buildings and single-family houses in cities and urban areas.

In apartment buildings, however, the fiber optic connection often only reaches the technical space of the building, because the internal networks of many houses built before 2010 are implemented with copper coaxial cables.

“The fiberization of single-family houses has been handled nicely, but the internal networks of apartment buildings have been neglected. The speed of fiber optic is dying in the technical condition of the apartment building,” says the CEO of the optical fiber company Lounea Talokuitujen Petri Syväjärvi.

According to Lounea’s estimate, there are more than one million apartment and townhouse apartments in Finland, where the indoor networks are based on copper cables.

“This is a big bottleneck in our society, because most of the apartment buildings in Finland were built in the 60s and 80s.”

Finns are estimated to need fiber optic connections for, for example, remote work meetings, online gaming and ultra-high definition television broadcasts.

“If the connection comes to the apartment via the old telephone line, there is no way to watch a 4K picture from, for example, Netflix or an 8K or 16K picture in the future,” says Syväjärvi.

ME:n the gigabit regulation obliges apartment buildings and townhouses to renew their internal network in connection with a significant renovation, specifically with fiber optic technology. There is no time limit for renewal, and the regulation’s 2030 goal is not believed in in the industry.

Lounea estimates that the cost of fiberizing the indoor network is around 1,000–1,500 euros per apartment.

“Fibering is slowed down by the fact that, on average, housing associations are not very wealthy. Nowadays, housing associations have difficulties even getting loans from banks,” says Syväjärvi.

Although the cost of upgrading the internal network is relatively small in connection with a major renovation, alternative financing models for fiber renovations have been developed in the field instead of a bank loan. For example, Lounea has developed a service model in which the company builds, finances and maintains the housing association’s internal network.

The construction of fiber networks of housing associations is supervised by the municipalities’ building control. The Finnish Transport and Communications Agency can also impose a fine on the property owner who violates the requirements of the EU regulation.