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(Norway has one third of the population density of the US).

Virtually all of Norway's citizens live in population centers. We have several times your entire population living in shitty little towns where AT&T owns all the fiber for the simple reason that no one else would bother to run anything to them but Ma Bell.

That must be the reason why Norway has such bad mobile coverage.</sarcasm>
And broadband isn't limited to population centers either: With a landline (available in every corner
of the country), you can get DSL everywhere, and VDSL in lots of places, including tiny villages.

And don't make me bring up Finland. There, you get 3G coverage on rural lakes .

C) 100% of Finland? Or 100% of the INHABITED areas.

About 97% of total area is covered - it is getting seriously hard to find a place without coverage even when hiking in the wilderness areas of Lapland. here is the coverage map of Finland's largest operator.

The number of towers is irrelevant, as the cost to maintain them must vary wildly. You might as well compare the population densities; Finland has half as many people per square km as USA (16 to 31). Since almost 100% of Finland is covered by at least one GSM network (see coverage maps from Sonera, Elisa), the maintenance cost of the networks per person should also be higher.

Many people here seem to be unaware of the lack of Wi-Fi hotspot coverage in Europe. And I didn't even mention the word free. In Finland, the Wi-Fi coverage is very spotty, unless you buy a subscription for unlimited service (and even these services are usually available only in limited areas). The advantage of 3G-based mobile broadband is that it covers a huge area, nearly the whole country (there are still many problematic areas, though). So you can you use the connection nearly everywhere and you don't have to worry finding a Wi-Fi hotspot when you want to check you email etc.

And people who flippet out by the 10 euros/day remark: Go read the article again. The remark was in the context of international roaming, which is horrendously expensive in Europe. 10 euros/day for unlimited data roaming might not be too bad compared to the usual rates the carriers charge for this. When you're in your home country, these services can be quite cheap. Generally the prices start from about 10euros/month for 384kb/s unlimited access and go to 20euros/month for 1Mbit/s unlimited or 30euros/month for 2Mbit/s unlimited access. (These prices are from the price lists of major carriers in Finland: http://saunalahti.fi/gsm/mobiililaajakaista.php, http://www.elisa.fi/matkaviestinta/liittymat/hinnasto/, http://www.sonera.fi/Puhelin+ja+liittym%E4/Liikkuva+laajakaista). Somebody commented in this discussion that mobile broadband that covers the whole country for 40$/month will maybe happen in 20 years. Well, it is already reality in Finland.

Coincidentally, in todays edition of Helsingin Sanomat (the largest newspaper in Finland) there was an article about the rising popularity of "mobile broadband" (article in Finnish only): http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Langattomalla+laajakaistalla+valtava+kysynt/1135234701006. Although the article talks more about the marketing of the HSDPA modems for laptops, it also mentions that the carriers expect that during this year about 10% of their clients will have subscribed to mobile broadband services. So the shift from Wi-Fi hotspots (that are nearly non-existent in Finland) to mobile broadband accesss is already happening - at least in Finland. I would imagine the situation is nearly identical in other Nordic countries also, and maybe in other countries in Europe.

Sonera charge E2/month ($2.58) for service but you wont see them handing you a new phone each year.

http://www.sonera.fi/GetImages/GetImages_GetImage_ pdf/0,2580,65423,00.pdf

That should give you some idea of the actual cost of providing cell service - and bear in mind that finland has half the population density of the entire USA.

Why don't you try packing 5 million citizens in California and still having around 98% coverage from two providers?

http://mobileplaza.sonera.fi/matkapuhelin/kuuluvuu s_kotimaassa.html
http://map3.centroid.fi/elisapeitto/mapa.php

This argument is getting a bit old. Yes, we've had two networks that cover the whole country for over 10 years now, and there really isn't any more people in Finland. We do have one or two network operators who only cover the densely populated areas, too.

very hidden in their page indeed
http://www.sonera.fi/artikkeli2/0,3843,l-fi_h-1070 5_a-251149,00.html

though nowadays you need to activate the service from your "personal pages".

When I lived in Finland (5+ years ago), my carrier had some sort of tracking service. Basicly, you just sent an sms with a keyword to a specific number, and got a reply with an address.

Surkeat tunarit

The current positioning technologies are GSM network-based positioning and GPS positioning. GSM positioning uses cell IDs that use the GSM networks and GPS positioning, satellite positioning. GPS-based positioning can position the target up to an accuracy of metres and is based on measuring the distance between the receiver and the satellite. Satellites send radio signals to the receiver and the receiver calculates how long it took the signal to reach it. GPS positioning does not usually work indoors.

You can read more at: Soneras website

Life is a sexually transmitted fatal disease.

They are not "leeches", they are "users", damn it! In the same way I can say that WWW is the cancer of the Internet, because it wastes so much resources. And I can call you a virus, because you are wasting perfectly good oxygen... Do you see the flaws in my reasoning? If you do, I hope you also understand that opposing P2P on the grounds of resource use is simply insane. If you had a 2400 modem access shared between 100 users, would that mean that images on web-pages are a plague? No, that would simply mean that your technical capabilities are inadequate for the needs of the users.

I absolutely hate it when network admins play this holier-than-thou game and pretend to know better what everyone should be doing. Surprise! Surprise! It's not for you to decide. If you work in the university, then students are the clients and they should have the final say in what is and what is not allowed on the network.

And if there is not enough bandwidth, well, then get more bandwidth. Charge students extra for the network connection if you have to. When I studied in LUT I paid 17 euros to Sonera for the 1024/256Kbit connection in my apartment without any limits whatsoever. You can also set up trafic shapers, give higher priority to non-P2P traffic, do anything else, but please don't bitch about P2P. If you are a taxi driver, it's not your fucking business where I want to go to. Shut up and get me there.

You are smoking crack. Just look that the wGate/homerun pricing: EXPENSIVE page 5, wgate. 6.73e PER CONNECTION and in "public service area" 0.33e per MINUTE?! Comparing the free wife.ee services provided for user convinience at cafes and airports to the GREEDY Finnish business operators is just ludicrous. Oh, and ofcourse, wgate/homerun is not availbel for sonsumers, only for business users.

Flat rate GPRS? not anymore, dna is capped at 100Mb/month.

Finland is dropping from the pace of tech, looks like we will get 3G only after the rest of world has got it.

And I think that is somewhat arrogant to call Estonia little brother of Finland. Our president and foreign minister kept embarassingly their mouth shut when Estionia was struggling to get rid of Russia.

Finns are quite precise about their privacy issues. Finnish media reacts very aggressievly to any insult of privacy, was it about snail-mail, telecommonucation or e-mail. A firm can ruin its reputation very badly, if someone finds out any interfering of privacy.

For example there is one major legal case underway, where Finland's biggest telecommunication company's head was arrested, including the former president of the company. The case is about tracing mobile phones to reveal people who are leaking sensitive information about the company to media.

So in the first place the article attached to this story trys to settle the concerned citizen by proving that the system is truly anonymous (temporary, non-personal and untraceable keys for following all those faceless mobile phones) and the police authorities have no access to it. I see no reason to doubt their honesty because the Road Administraion (which will use the system) is governmental bureau and lying might lead to yet-another privacy scandal in Finland.

And like Italy there are almost as many mobile phones as telephone lines.

I assume you mean telephones. Anyhow, we got past that point several months ago. Face it: there are more cell phones than there are regular ones.

There are three GSM operators in here, Sonera (originally Telecom Finland, partially owned by state), Radiolinja (owned partially by local telephone companies) and the Swedish Telia (also partly government-owned). Fourth is coming, Saunalahti will begin it's cell phone service in a month or so. Hope they'll push the already reasonable (albeit still expensive for a student :) prices down a little bit more. Especially WAP connection prices are way too high IMHO.

While I like this from a crypto standpoint, I can't help but wonder why the sudden change in policy

Most of the EU countries have previously supported encryption (UK and France being notable exceptions). The change in policy is "sudden" only if you consider that previous policy to be the one specified in the Wassenaar agreement, which was pushed down the throats of other countries by US bullies.

I'm guessing that corporations have been pushing for this and exerting power to make this happen. While I'm glad they did, it is another example of money buying policy (and for once, not in the US).

While there certainly are economic incentives to protect the interests of the european cryptography industry, the conspiracy theory is needless in this case. The idea for the change probably came from the Directorate-General for the Information Society, which is spear-headed by Erkki Liikanen (who was also quoted in the article). See these links for more information:

• Mission of the Directorate-General for the Information Society
• Speech by Erkki Liikanen
• The World by Commissioner Erkki Liikanen, European Commission

IMHO Quake I is still the number one realtime multiplaying game.
Okay, the pure deathmatch is quite stupid, but still it beats Q2, Q3A, Unreal and all the others. Quake I may not be as pretty as the games listed above, but Q1 feel and atmosphere is something that any other game haven't been able to achieve.
And because it's pretty old game, you don't need the latest 3D accelerator that supports transparent-bumbing-flare-with-5th-reality-and-a-k itchen-sink effect to play it.
Overall game-play is just something that they don't do anymore, which is a shame. For example no delays when changing weapons - not very realistic but fun, easy and efficient.

And not to mention those great mods like CTF and TeamFortress.
Playing Q2 and Half-Life ports of these mods just don't rise the same feeling as the original ones do.
For example when I first tried TeamFortress Classics for Half-Life, I thought it just was a bad joke by people with sick sense of humour. Playing TFC just felt horrible when compared to the original TF. The great balance between classes was ruined and smaller versions of great TF maps with ugly textures almost made me puke. Never again, thanks.

Apparently quite a many other people thinks this way, too. At least here in Finland playing Q1/QW is still quite popular. To check out the state of Q1/QW scene, just join some major Finnish QW server like Sonera's small.qw.edome.net for deathmatch or tfa.qw.edome.net for TF or some other server.
From 10AM to 10PM GMT+00 you even may encounter some troubles when joining a game on the most popular servers since at that time they often are full. Around 03AM GMT+00 they all are empty, though.

Quake was the first well-working action game with multiplaying using IPv4.
Quake will be the last well-working action game with multiplaying using IPv4.
Since whe have the source, we can add IPv6 support.
You can be an Internet2 user and still you can play Quake I.
Quake One will never die.

http://kuuluvuus.radiolinja.fi/ -- they claim that they are covering 98% of the population.

And the other service provider: http://www.sonera.fi/gsm/kuuluvuus/index.html

Btw those are gsm/900 maps.