Page 13 - Sphere No.27 (Sep 2010)

“In Denmark, 25 per cent of the population
have a paid broadband home office solution,” said
Ms Hansen. “Whenever a new employee starts in
a company or someone gets a new job, a lot of cost
and time is used in closing fixed line broadband
solutions and acquiring new ones. Today, some of
our customers choose mobile broadband instead.
The advantages are that there is no cost for instal-
lation, and no work involved in closing broadband
lines and ordering new ones. The new employee
simply gets a mobile phone, a mobile broadband
router and two SIM cards, and that is efficient and
up-and-running within their home office on the
first day of work.”
Agriculture is another sector that has benefited
from 3’s mobile broadband technology. Ivan
Munk of the IT centre of Dansk Landbrug, the
Danish Agriculture and Food Council, pointed
out that before 3 some of the people with whom
they and their offices needed to maintain contact
had no access to broadband at all, because of a
lack of land lines in their areas.
According to Mr Munk although access to
the Internet and improved communications
have helped increase efficiency in agriculture,
this is mostly attributable to having coverage
which was not previously available, rather than
primarily to the 3 network’s mobile communica-
tions flexibility.
Some small companies in remote areas such
as northwest Jutland are wholly dependent on 3’s
network because neither fibre nor ADSL con-
nections had previously been available, although
there are also service providers to agriculture
which report distinct advantages to being able to
access and communicate data while away from
the office.
One agricultural company, Dalsgaard &
Liboriussen based in western Jutland, reports
that broadband had never found its way to their
remote town, but now 3 has provided them with a
connection to the world.
The case for 3’s mobile network as the plat-
form for data communications appears to be well
proven. Now, according to Mr Fok, the company
which has invested so much capital and faith in
building it will begin to see a healthy return on
the contribution it has made to connecting some
of the remotest areas of Scandinavia to each other,
and to the world.
Traditional mobile telephony investments, he
pointed out, generally take 10 to 15 years to turn a
profit. In Denmark, with data communications,
3 has done it in under seven.
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