OSLO, Norway -- Residents and owners of summer houses on the Trøndelag coast in Norway will be the first to benefit from Telenor's investment in WiMAX radio-based broadband technology. Telenor is adopting this technology to provide a service to areas that cannot be covered by traditional ADSL.

Telenor's first bid for radio-based technology has been submitted to the county of Sør-Trøndelag and applies to the municipalities of Frøya, Hitra, Klæbu and Snillfjord. In addition to the private market, there are also fish farming plants and other industries which are looking forward to receiving broadband coverage in this area.

WiMAX is a radio technology for wireless broadband and will make it possible to extend the level of broadband coverage to 98 percent with a download speed of at least 1Mbit/s. Telenor has bought 36 frequency blocks for WiMAX, which is sufficient to cover the whole country. A contract has been concluded with Airspan Networks on the supply of WiMAX base stations.

"A WiMAX base station is the size of a laptop, and can be mounted on a mast or post. Expansion is based on existing infrastructure, but it will also take some months from the start of expansion until the first clients are on the Internet via WiMAX," says Berit Svendsen, division manager at Telenor. "The service will match the ADSL product for the private market, but be restricted to 2Mbit/s for the time being. Telenor will offer broadband telephony via WiMAX at a later date," concludes Svendsen.

Telenor Group (Nasdaq: TELN)