4 Oct 2011Norway Broadband Overview

In 1994, Norwegian telecommunications market was liberalised and Norwegian Telecom was established as a public corporation. In 1995, it changed its name to Telenor and five years later, in December 2000, Telenor was partly privatised and listed on the stock exchange. Doors to competition opened further with introduction of carrier pre-selection on 1 June 1999 and Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) in 2002.

Over the last decade, the Norwegian telecoms market saw two key trends - convergence and increased demand for mobile communications solutions. They are manifested by an increasing availability of telephony, broadband and TV service bundles and by the fact that many broadband services are becoming available via mobile networks. Use of IP technology for data transmission, particularly in the form of MPLS, is also increasing, gradually replacing traditional transmission services such as SDH, ATM and Frame Relay.

The trend of fixed lines being replaced by mobile phones continues. The total number of fixed network subscriptions has been declining since 1996. The number of ISDN subscriptions has been increasing until 2002, but started falling since then. In 2010, the total number of fixed line subscriptions including VoIP fell by 6.9 per cent and totalled 1.65 million at the end of the year. At the end of 2010, 35 per cent of all residential fixed telephony customers had broadband telephony, compared with 33 per cent at the end of 2009. This was different from the previous year, when the number of VoIP subscriptions fell by 1.1 per cent between end-2009 and end-2010.

One of the distinguishing features of Internet in Norway is network neutrality. The model has been the object of great interest since it was first presented internationally almost two years ago. Its key principle is that the Internet should be an open and non-discriminatory platform for all types of communication and content distribution.