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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 .

You are full of shit.

http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/sim-only-plans/all-sim-plans
http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/sim-only/
http://www.telenor.no/bedrift/produkter/mobil/tjenester/datakort/
http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/Cell-Phone-Detail.aspx?cell-phone=T-Mobile-SIM-Card
https://www.wireless.att.com/GoPhoneWeb/goPhoneLanding.do?method=activatePayGo
http://www.thebeijingguide.com/communications/mobile_access_in_beijing.html

I tracked down a picture of her. Take a look! PICTURE

Names are difficult, eh?

This kind of service has been available here in the small country of Norway for a while too! Trough the largest phone provider, Telenor.

What the hell's wrong with you?

What the hell's wrong with your telecommunications provider. Prime offender: Telenor. In 2000 I was going to get ADSL. I got it in 2003. In 2004 I moved, again to an area where they claim you can get ADSL, but I'm still waiting. Oh yeah, the former place didn't have cable (too many people on the street with satellite), the latter hasn't upgraded the cable network to do Internet. WOHOO!!!!

Kjella

Here in Norway, we've got Location Services (often referred to as POS). Any content provider receives the following information connected to an end users location: latitude, longitude, start- and end-angel, inner and outer radius, region, municipal-number and county.

The system works up to 300m accurate in city centres, but might be as much as 35km accurate in rural areas (since there are less antennas that can be used in triangulating the signal).

Information about the end user is not available content providers, since those content providers receive only a unique static id for each customer that orders a Location Service.

A service using POS would be a lot better than a service where you rely on a specific kind of cellphone being on, not in use and equipped with a specific Java application (of which you have no clue what it in fact does, since it was installed for you).

The best thing of all: with POS users have to specifically approve requests for any content provider. So no sneaky applications that parents can install on mobile phones.

The invasion of privacy "offered" by the Teens Arrive Alive system should scare any sane American away from the system, assuming that the fact that it comes recommended by the former chief of military ops in Iraq wasn't enough to make you scream and run for your life.

The Norwegian ISP Telenor tried to limit the bandwidth on their ADSL costumers. They initially had a limit of a whole 1 GB pr. month. Imagine, they allowed people to download half a Linux distribution a month! You could still read your mail at ISDN speed if you exceeded your limit, though. They later increased this limit to an incredible 30 GB/mo.

Telenor soon realized even 30 GB/mo wasn't generous enough, they were loosing their marked share to the large number of ISPs with a lower price pr. month and no download limit. They still block port 25 and 80 and have a clause in their terms of use that clearly states that you are not allowed to run any form of server service on your line (people have actually got warnings for running "ssh servers", but atleast they've droppet that redicilous bw limit. So unless ALL the ISPs suddenly start doing this all at once the providers that to try to scam people this way will simply find themselves without any income. (Telenor is what previously was the state phone monopoly "televerket", they own just about all the local fiber and can, because of their position, get away with pretty much everything. Kind of like Microsoft.. ).

This reminds me of a project in Norway. In relation to the upcoming UMTS rollout here, Telenor - the largest Norwegian telco - is introducing something they call Mobile Eye Phone. It's basically just a camera, microphone and earplugs connected via UMTS to a remote guide. He gets a live video feed and can assist the blind person in navigating in new places. I've seen this on TV tested with a blind person taking his 6 year old daugther on a trip out of the country and it seemed to work really well. Given that the person only need to place a call when he need help navigating.

A combination of the two technology would create a fallback when this new technology fail. And it will fail, just look at OCR.

url should be telenor.no, not .net, my bad. VeriSign made me typo.. ;)

...it`s Telenor

Interesting: the guy says that "our typical customer uses 20X less capacity than the recommended usage level".
Means that an average guy uses around 1.5 Go a month.

In Norway, the major state controled telco (who had a monopoly until not so long ago...) is also one of the major broadband companies.

About 6 months ago, they decided to set up a limit for their connection. Not a 1Go/day but 1Go a month.

You have to pay about 12 more if you want to get a better deal. Check the prices.

I always wondered what the average broadband user was using. Knowing that in Scandinavia, Internet is pretty well established, I guess that the average user uses at least 1.5 Go a month. Thus many users are in fact obliged to pay more than the well advertised entry level offer.

Their interest in putting a limit is not to solve a technical problem and they do not target the one percent of the users who create this problem.
They target 50% of their users, they want to charge them as much as possible. Knowing that the persons who want more bandwidth are going to go to their competitors.

I think I understand very well their strategy. Norwegians do not complain. It's not in their way of living. The competitors, it they don't downgrade their offer to similar terms, will have on average people who use more their connections. Thus they will face higher infrastructure costs and lower revenues.

On the other side, Telenor gets on average better revenues, and no need to upgrade their lines as fast as their customers.

In the long run, I have top admit I think they are doing the right thing for their business (and I hate to admit it).

Interesting: the guy says that "our typical customer uses 20X less capacity than the recommended usage level".
Means that an average guy uses around 1.5 Go a month.

In Norway, the major state controled telco (who had a monopoly until not so long ago...) is also one of the major broadband companies.

About 6 months ago, they decided to set up a limit for their connection. Not a 1Go/day but 1Go a month.

You have to pay about 12 more if you want to get a better deal. Check the prices.

I always wondered what the average broadband user was using. Knowing that in Scandinavia, Internet is pretty well established, I guess that the average user uses at least 1.5 Go a month. Thus many users are in fact obliged to pay more than the well advertised entry level offer.

Their interest in putting a limit is not to solve a technical problem and they do not target the one percent of the users who create this problem.
They target 50% of their users, they want to charge them as much as possible. Knowing that the persons who want more bandwidth are going to go to their competitors.

I think I understand very well their strategy. Norwegians do not complain. It's not in their way of living. The competitors, it they don't downgrade their offer to similar terms, will have on average people who use more their connections. Thus they will face higher infrastructure costs and lower revenues.

On the other side, Telenor gets on average better revenues, and no need to upgrade their lines as fast as their customers.

In the long run, I have top admit I think they are doing the right thing for their business (and I hate to admit it).