In this paper we present some recent work we performed on the socio-economic impact of fibre access networks (FTTH/FTTx). We summarise some results from a pre-study on the effects of fibre deployments in Sweden. Specifically, we list and quantify savings in data and telecommunications costs for Swedish local governments, estimate the added values for fibre-connected citizens, and present a multivariate regression analysis of the early impact on employment and population evolution, building on data from 290 municipalities between 2007 and 2010: we find a weak but statistically significant correlation, and we are able to exclude backward causality.