The importance of business travel and Wi-Fi in Norway
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Norway is not an easy country to travel through.
It is formed of some of the oldest rocks in the world. It is very long and thin. It is dominated by mountain masses. The average altitude is 500 m (1,640 ft). It has the two highest points in Europe north of the Alpine-Carpathian mountain range. Much of Norway has been scraped by ice, and there are 1,700 glaciers totaling some 3,400 sq km (1,310 sq mi). The coastline is penetrated by the almost numberless fjords digging deep into the countryside. So, yes, traveling or transport over land is time consuming and difficult.
As such, the country needs to maintain a well-developed airport system for efficient transport for business and leisure. Norway has a variety of travel systems, but for trips over 500 KM (300 miles), air travel is preferred 63% of the time. And, international travel continues to grow.
Norway is among the most developed communication markets in the world. Why? The penetration of smartphones is close to 45%; the market expects the penetration of tablets to exceed 250,000 two months after the launch of the Apple iPad; and the wireless network system is well developed, together with different wired systems enabling efficient communication all over. You can see in the graph that the mobile broadband market continues to grow. There are some 50 different service providers competing on price and quality in order to develop this market further.
In a country where travel is difficult, there are three major global industries in Norway, all requiring business travel. These are:
1. Oil and gas
2. Atlantic salmon (leading producer)
3. Exploration of renewable energy – solar, hydropower, both off-shore and on-shore wind capacity, and wave power, to name a few.
With all of the factors noted above, you can see the importance of the vWLAN system in Norway. There’s a need for business travel and a need to be connected while traveling.
As an iPass customer you can use your iPass client to access internet and your business systems on all of Avinor’s 46 airports in Norway, through our new partnership with Oslo Lufthavn Tele & Data AS (OLTD).
Tags: Europe, mobile network, wi-fi access
