Míla is a

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

company in

Iceland Iceland is a Nordic countries, Nordic island country between the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is culturally and politically linked with Europe and is the regi ...

, wholly owned by Ardian. It owns, operates and maintains Iceland's largest trunk telecommunication network, copper and

fibre Fiber (spelled fibre in British English; from ) is a natural or artificial substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other materials. The strongest engineering materials often incorp ...

access networks as well as a

radio access network A radio access network (RAN) is part of a mobile telecommunication system implementing a radio access technology (RAT). Conceptually, it resides between a device such as a mobile phone, a computer, or any remotely controlled machine and provi ...

. It was established in 2007 following its split from

Síminn Síminn hf. (, ; also known as Iceland Telecom Ltd.), previously named Landssíminn (, ), is an Icelandic telecommunications company. It offers communication services for both private and corporate clients, including mobile ( 4G/ 5G), landline, i ...

, the former state-owned incumbent telecom.

History

Iceland's former incumbent telecom operator,

, traces its history back to 1906. The incumbent was split from postal operations ( Iceland Post) in 1998 and was privatised in 2005 as Síminn, when it was sold to Skipti hf. Shortly after, the physical trunk and access network were split into a new company called Míla in 2007 in a similar approach to

Openreach Openreach Limited is a company wholly owned by BT Group plc, that maintain telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to various national broadband and telephone networks. T ...

being split from BT. Míla remained under the ownership of the former incumbent Síminn until 2022, when it was sold to the French private equity firm Ardian.

Operations

Míla operates a national telecommunications trunk and access network serving the whole of Iceland. Leased line services include

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

, DWDM, STM and

E-carrier The E-carrier is a member of the series of carrier systems developed for digital transmission of many simultaneous telephone calls by time-division multiplexing. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) ori ...

. It offers wholesale services to internet service providers, data centres and other telecommunications companies in Iceland. The original basis of its domestic operations is a fibre ring that encircles the country, roughly following the route of Iceland's

ring road A ring road (also known as circular road, beltline, beltway, circumferential (high)way, loop or orbital) is a road or a series of connected roads encircling a town, city or country. The most common purpose of a ring road is to assist in reducin ...

(Route 1). It was constructed in 1989–1991 by the Icelandic Government and

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO ; , OTAN), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental organization, intergovernmental Transnationalism, transnational military alliance of 32 Member states of NATO, member s ...

to link radar stations of the Iceland Air Defence System. It consists of 8 fibres, 5 of which are owned by Míla. The fibre ring has now been duplicated or replaced on most routes and Míla's fibre reaches almost all towns in the country. It also operates a

microwave transmission Microwave transmission is the transmission of information by electromagnetic waves with wavelengths in the microwave frequency range of 300 MHz to 300 GHz (1 m - 1 mm wavelength) of the electromagnetic spectrum. Microwave signal ...

network. Míla operates a fibre access network to households and businesses in Iceland based on

GPON ITU-T G.984 is the series of standards for implementing a gigabit-capable passive optical network (GPON). It is commonly used to implement the link to the customer (the ''last kilometre'', or ''last mile'') of fibre-to-the-premises ( FTTP) serv ...

and

XGS-PON 10G-PON (also known as XG-PON or G.987) is a 2010 computer networking standard for data links, capable of delivering shared Internet access rates up to 10 Gbit/s (gigabits per second) over dark fiber. This is the ITU-T's next-generation sta ...

offered through wholesale access to

internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

s, nominally offering 1 Gbit/s speeds. In 2023, Míla began offering 10 Gbit/s service to households. Míla inherited the copper access network from the former incumbent operator, which supplies

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over Copper wire, copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem ...

and

VDSL Very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) and very high-speed digital subscriber line 2 (VDSL2) are digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies providing data transmission faster than the earlier standards of asymmetric digital subscriber li ...

services. VDSL services were introduced in 2009, offering between 50 and 100 Mbit/s speeds. Previously, the copper network served analogue telephone ( POTS) and

ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is a set of communication standards for simultaneous digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services over the digitalised circuits of the public switched telephone network. ...

services, but were shut down in 2022. In 2024, Míla announced a full copper phase-out including the closure of DSL connections on a rolling basis by 2028.

References

{{Telecommunications in Iceland Companies of Iceland

History

Operations

See also

References