Posted by harrall
During the last six months or so, there’s been quite a bit of discussion in Norwegian media about the need for higher and higher broadband speeds and the use of fiber access networks in particluar. Telco pundits have made a number of different arguments, but the main ones are something like this:
* You’re never going to need more than 4 Mbit/s (or so) so there’s really no point in building fiber networks.
* You’re never going to need more than whatever LTE can offer because mobile networks are the future.
* You’re going to need more and more capacity so you might as well build fiber-based networks.
Well. It turns out there are quite a few areas in rural Norway that built fiber networks many years ago. So we went to talk to them. During January and February we conducted in-depth interviews with fiber operators, public officials and end users in six rural counties. Here’s what they told us:
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