Telenor Norway upgraded over 9,000 base stations at 6,379 sites across the country over the summer, including Svalbard and oil installations in the North Sea, to prepare them for LTE starting in 2012. More than 1,000 of these sites could only be reached by helicopter in order to replace the equipment. Half of the base stations are ready for 14 Mbps and 21 Mbps service. Mobile data traffic is doubling each year and Telenor estimates there will be 15 times more by 2015. Some 1,250 tons of equipment was removed in the upgrade, whose new equipment reduces Telenor's energy consumption by about 15 GWh a year, or the equivalent consumption of 800 homes. CEO Berit Svendsen emphasised that behind the major investment was an ambition to make Norway a showcase for the rest of the world with regard to consumers' ability to access all the information they want outside the office, up at the cabin or down on the beach.
