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Telenor press release about that matter: http://www.telenor.com/media/p...

Of course Telenor themselves mention the bandwidth: http://www.telenor.com/media/a...
Fibre optic with lots of Gb/s to the European mainland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Can be noted that any citizen of a country which has signed the Svalbard treaty can move there without needing any permit.

I think part of what you are finding is based on link congestion, the transcontinental links aren't what they ought to be. Also you can't confuse upstream and downstream, if someone has a 512k DSL connection it's probably 512k/128k not 512k symmetric.

I was talking about people who have 512 kbps upstream, not downstream.

As for your DSL connection, that's around what you can get in the US. It's generally 6mbps, not 8 (different DSL standard that most use) but same rough area. Likewise, cable modem connections tend to be in the 6-12mbps range (mine is 10mbps).

Basic ADSL is generally G.DMT, also known as ITU G.992.1 which supports 8 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream (although most implementations limit the upstream to 800 kbps). This is the ADSL standard in use (even more basic is ANSI T1.413 but I don't know of any ISPs that still use that).

As for Bredbandsbolaget (BBB), they used to have pretty shoddy bandwidth but they got bought out by Telenor recently so hopefully they'll improve now that they're owned by a backbone provider.

/Mikael

and actually, Sweden has this child porn filter too. That one I did not expect, you live to learn :)

GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.

Not quite. GSM was a group by CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations). It was indeed independent of the EU's directive to reserve the 900 MHz band, because it was founded before (actually it seems that the directive was passed to allow this group finish its work).
I just found a nice article about this here (PDF).
(There are also some other articles about the creation of GSM.

GSM started as a project by France Telecom's mobile phone subdivision and was created independently of the EU's directive. It was one of the standards considered by the various standards groups, and in the end was their choice.

Not quite. GSM was a group by CEPT (the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations). It was indeed independent of the EU's directive to reserve the 900 MHz band, because it was founded before (actually it seems that the directive was passed to allow this group finish its work).
I just found a nice article about this here (PDF).
(There are also some other articles about the creation of GSM.

China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.

Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.

An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.

Not exactly. The norwegian governemnt owned 53,15 % of the largest norwegian TelCo as of the 1st of June 2004. And there are other telecommunications companies.

And, just to mention something on topic, Norway is commonly referred to as a social-democracy.

I called my old ISP (just before I switched to another), Telenor, which is Norway's biggest ISP. The line sucked, I never got the speed I was supposed to have, and it was down approx. 2 hours every three nights or so. Well, I called them once when things didn't work.

Me: Hello, my DSL Internet connection doesn't work!
Lady on phone: Okay, what is your subscription ID?
*says all the formal stuff...*
Lady: What operating system do you run?
Me: Linux.
Lady: What?
Me: Linux.
Lady: Windows?
Me: Linux!
Lady: What is that, Leniks? Me: Yes, Linux.
Lady: What is it? Do we support that?

...and at that point I hung up, laughed hard and waited until the problem was sorted out by itself.

Yet another reason not to use huge ISPs.

There are several systems for paying via the mobile phone here, and they range from complicated to dead simple.
The most complicated is the Mobilhandel system by Telenor. It is very complicated to set up but once it is done you can pay via SMS for ski passes, lattes, cinema tickets, even sex toys.

You also have the Payex system, Contopronto and a few minor.

The war between the systems is on and the firs casualty seem to be Payex with high fees and complicated systems. The Mobilhandel system is complicated but has the backing of the telecom company Telenor while the Contopronto system seem to be a fast-moving cute alternative.

And it is easy to use. You don't even have to be a customer there to recieve money through the phone.

Norwegian telco Telenor sold a phone named SmartPhone a few years ago. http://press.telenor.com/PR/200003/798859_5.html. It was sold in shops, and was an internet enabled phone with browser and email support.

Don't know if they trademarked it, though.

Ehh... she's probably making more money than both of us.

UMTS was opened in Oslo, Norway on Saturday. It's just too bad there aren't any gadgets on the market yet, so we're not going to see a lot of it yet.