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Norway to Wire North Pole

Posted by michael on from the tv's-on-the-fritz-again dept.

TomMajor writes "Norway will lay an underwater fiber-optic cable from the mainland to Svalbard and turn remote Longyearbyen into the world's best connected village, providing residents with 100 TV stations and a full VDSL (very high bit-rate DSL) network..."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. The poster got the wrong end of the stick by psyconaut · · Score: 5, Informative

    The idea is NOT to necessarily make this the best wired remote village, it's to BACKHAUL data from the satellite station that's located there. (If you read the story this becomes blatantly obvious).

    Providing connectivity for the village is just a (happy) side effect. I mean, did anyone really believe the Norweigan's were spending USD$40m to provide connectivity to 1700 people?

    -psy

  2. Re:Longyearbyen? by barakn · · Score: 5, Informative
    From infoplease.com:

    Longyearbyen , town and administrative center of Svalbard, on Isfjorden, Spitsbergen island. It is a coal-mining settlement, founded (1905) by an American company and named after the American miner J. M. Longyear. Its coal mines were transferred to a Norwegian company in 1916. It was destroyed (Sept., 1943) by German battleships but was quickly rebuilt.

    --
    "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  3. Good for complaining, anyhow by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now I can call the phone company and say, "They've got DSL at the North Pole but you still can't figure out how to run it up my street?

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)