Telenor Xpress 4 - 2000

AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Are telecommunications companies only as technologically advanced as the markets they serve? According to Telenor’s chief technical officer Berit Svendsen, providing services to one of the world’s most sophisticated and demanding populations has kept Telenor on the cutting edge of technological development.

Offering high-tech products and services to the home market is not new for Telenor. During the past year, the company has launched the web-enabled Smartphone and a new interactive TV provider, Zonavi. More recently, Telenor has started testing VDSL (Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line), an exciting new technology that provides users simultaneous access to 30 digital TV channels on up to three TVsets, high-speed Internet connection, and regular telephone service through existing telephone lines.

BUILDING THE BROADBAND HIGHWAY
According to Berit Svendsen, Telenor’s chief technical officer, VDSL is currently being pilot tested in Norway. By next summer, 1,000 Telenor customers will be the first in Europe to test out the new service. “Transfer speeds are currently 26 Mbits per second in the test phase, but we can upgrade line capacity to enable transfer speeds of up to 52 Mbits per second,” she says.

Svendsen says the Hybrid Broadband Access project began in 1999, in response to competition from cable TVoperators and the need to upgrade existing telephone lines. “To achieve the same end-to-end quality our customers enjoy with fix telephone line service, the network must be built out to the customer,” she observes. “This is a technology that we hope to make available to everyone in the domestic market.”

BUILDING A TEAM
The Hybrid Broadband Access team was assembled by Svendsen and her predecessor, former CTO Ole Petter Håkonsen. It included representatives from different business units at Telenor, including Telenor Research and Development, Telecom and Telenor Broadband Services. For Svendsen, the team is a good model of how Telenor works.

“Today, we are seeing an increasing trend towards a convergence of services,” Svendsen says. “To develop the technologies that enable this convergence, we utilise the skills of people that work in different areas of Telenor.” She adds that in addition to making the development of new technologies more efficient, bringing together a mix of people from different parts of Telenor encouraged innovative thinking and creative problem solving.

OPEN STANDARDS The team prioritised the use of open standards. This approach allows suppliers and content providers the opportunity to innovate and develop products and services to match the needs of the market. “Because we are a medium-sized operator, we focus on adapting quickly to standards as soon as they are developed,” she says. “We don’t have the luxury of the economy of scale.”

Svendsen acknowledges that the success of the VDSL project would not have been possible without the co-operation of Telenor’s strategic partners. The Hybrid Access Project team worked closely with content provider Canal Digital and Next Level Communications, a leading provider of set-top boxes.

THE END USER IS ALWAYS RIGHT
While Svendsen says that the greatest challenge to implementing the VDSL project was developing the technology, she believes the toughest part of the project still lies ahead: Bringing the technology to the marketplace. Svendsen points out that while Norwegians are remarkably quick to adapt to new technologies, they are selective about what technologies they actually use. Unless the technology has been developed to match the needs of the end-user, it won’t survive for long. “Developing technology is not enough,” Svendsen says. “We must show our customers what the technology can do and why it will make their lives easier.”

While Telenor’s Hybrid Broadband Access project remains in the test phase for now, Svendsen is confident that VDSLtechnology will soon be in demand throughout Norway. And once Telenor demonstrates its success in the home market, the company will consider offering similar services via a related technology (LMDS — Local Multipoint Distribution System) to customers in other countries where the company has operations. “Norway is one of the best test markets for new technologies in the world,” Svendsen says. “Providing cutting-edge services to the home market has kept us ahead of the curve in technological development.”



Text by: Alexander Wardwell