Telenor Xpress 4 - 2000

A COLD PASSION FOR COMMUNICATIONS

Ever wonder why the Nordic region leads the world in mobile phone penetration and Internet use – and is home to some of the most dynamic communications technology companies in the world? The answer is as old as the northern landscape itself.

Visitors to the Nordic region may be awed by its natural beauty, but this harsh, varied landscape has always presented a unique challenge for the people who settled in the area more than 2,500 years ago: communication.

ROUGH WEATHER, HARSH ENVIRONMENT
In Norway, for example, a country with almost 22,000 kilometres of rugged coastline and a mountainous interior, early settlers were forced to live in small valleys or inlets in relative isolation from each other – making communications between settlements difficult. To thrive in such an environment, these small communities were forced to cooperate and communicate with each other using whatever means necessary.

Berit Svendsen, chief technology officer at Telenor, believes the Nordic region’s unique environment has played a major role in the area’s history of communications expertise. “Difficult topography, harsh weather and a maritime tradition have all been contributing factors,” she says. “Necessity breeds innovation.”

TELEGRAPH TECHNOLOGY
For centuries Scandinavians relied on the skill of sailors and the endurance of foot messengers when communicating over long distances. But it wasn’t until the introduction of the telegraph, invented by Scottish-American Samuel Morse in 1837, that the region began to develop the culture that has formed the basis for the region’s world-renowned communications competence.

Scandinavians were quick to recognise the technology’s potential. Telenor was founded in 1855 as the Norwegian Telegraph Company, two years after Sweden established its first telegraph company. Afew years later, Ericsson was born when its founder, Lars Magnus Ericsson, opened a repair shop for telegraph equipment.

According to Terje Ellefsen, curator of the Norwegian Telecom Museum, the telegraph found eager converts in the shipping industry. “The telegraph made it more costeffective for Norwegian shipping companies to place and receive orders,” he explains. “In this way, the telegraph was transformed from a novelty to a business tool.”

CALL ME
The same quick adaptation greeted the introduction of the telephone. According to Ellefsen, it is likely that the first telephone call made in Europe occurred in Norway, less than a year after Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone in 1876. For the next twenty years, telephone switching stations were installed throughout Scandinavia at a rapid pace. Today, many Nordic telecommunications companies are engaged in a similar rush to build broad-band networks.

The region led the world in telephone penetration as early as the mid-1880s. In 1885, Stockholm had 5,000 telephones – more than any other major city in the world. Finland's first telephone exchange began operating in Turku in October 1881. By the 1890s, Norway had one telephone for every 140 inhabitants: the highest ratio in the world.

GOING MOBILE
A harsh environment and a culture quick to adapt to new technologies may explain some of the region’s strength in communications technology. But according to Hans Myhre, a senior project manager for Telenor Mobile Communications, the region’s technological lead in mobile telephony would not have been possible without full cooperation among all the Nordic countries.

MEETING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
In July 1969, the Nordic Teleconference met under the midnight sun in Lofoten, a picturesque island chain in the north of Norway. The participants, representatives from the state-owned Nordic telecommunications companies, agreed to co-operate in establishing a workable mobile telephone network which would be known as Nordic Mobile Telephony, or NMT.

Myhre says that the international team of NMT developers worked closely with different teams, meeting at least twice a month to share information. Unlike competing services, NMT was built on an open platform and in close co-operation with suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia. Each telecommunications company contributed its own expertise. “This spirit of co-operation allowed us to pool our technical resources to achieve the best result,” Myhre says.

Although the system would take ten years to launch, NMT was the first and most successful mobile network of its kind. With superior sound quality, message buffering, roaming capacity and excellent coverage, NMT would form the basis for GSM, the standard that has since been adopted by the world. “From the beginning,” Myhre says, “we focussed on the customer. That meant the handsets had to be affordable, reliable, easy to use and provide good sound quality.”

WEAVING A WEB
The early development of Internet services in the Nordic region demonstrates another reason why Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes and Icelanders lead the world in the use of sophisticated communications tools: rapid adaptation of new technologies.

Like the telegraph and the telephone, the Internet was created overseas. Developed by the US Department of Defence and later used by university researchers to exchange data, the Internet found early converts in the Nordic region. As early as 1973 Norway had established a connection with the ARPANET (an early form of the Internet), becoming the first country outside the United States to be connected. By 1982, Denmark and Sweden were connected to EUnet (an early form of the Internet), while Finland launched its first IP network in 1989. But it wasn’t until 1991, when the World Wide Web was released to the public, that the commercial benefits of the network were realised.

PROFITABLE INNOVATION
According to Kjell Martin Holen, director of integration management for Telenor’s communications service provider Nextra, the commercial use of the Internet in Norway began on 11 November 1991 in a small office outside Oslo. Formed in co-operation with the Norwegian Postal Authority, a ten-person team, then known as TelePost, set out to develop an electronic messaging service to help streamline the postal system’s customs bureaucracy.

Holen says the team developed one of the first effective business-to-business interfaces in Scandinavia. “While primitive by today’s standards, our simple messaging system was the first of its kind in Norway,” Holen says. It was so effective, TelePost was able to secure contracts with Sweden’s state own telecommunications company, Telia and later, British Telecom. TelePost eventually separated from the Norwegian Postal Authority, and, working in co-operation with a competing Internet company, developed Scandinavia Online (SOL). Shortly after its launch in 1996, the service was used by 70 percent of the residential market and 50 percent of the business market in Norway.

Holen believes that the high Internet penetration in Scandinavia is the result of several factors. “High PC penetration and excellent fixed-line coverage created demand for Internet services,” he says. “Both the technology and the market were mature.” Today, Nextra continues to develop and introduce cutting-edge technologies at home and abroad.

BEST TEST MARKET
The Nordic region’s expertise in communications technology has created one of the most sophisticated and demanding customer bases in the world. As a result, many global companies eager to test new products or technologies regard the Nordic region as the world’s best test market. Each time a new technology is introduced, from VDSL (Very high speed Digital Subscriber Line) to interactive TV, Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes and Icelanders will probably get to try it first.

As one of the Nordic region’s leading telecommunications companies, Telenor has been providing advanced communications services for more than 150 years. And while the company will continue to develop and adapt new technologies, Berit Svendsen insists that the key to any successful launch is not the device, but the user. “Technology is only a tool,” she says. “Our business is about using communications to make the lives of our customers simpler and more convenient.”

THE NEXT 1,000 YEARS
From the signal fires pioneered by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago to the region’s rapid installation of broadband networks today, it is likely that the people who live in the Nordic region will continue to recognise the value of co-operation and realise the advantage of adapting quickly to new technologies. And while no one can predict the future of communications technologies, we can be sure that the people of the Nordic region will get to try it first.



Text by: Alexander Wardwell