Telenor Norway’s CTO, Magnus Zetterberg, said the company plans to completely shut down its 3G network in 2020, five years before it closes 2G in 2025.
Speaking at the company’s analyst and investor day, Zetterberg talked up the company’s evolution of 4G, established in Norway in 2012, which now accounts for 60 per cent of all mobile data traffic in the country.
He said the company is now focused on a data centric model, with a longer term view to “dismantle legacy networks and eventually phase out 3G in 2020, before closing out 2G by 2025 and complete the data transition”.
“It’s better to retain 2G than 3G because all the devices today are still embedded with 2G, so you will lose out without the network,” he said. “2G is still important for the M2M market.”
By the end of 2016, the company said it hopes to have 99 per cent of the population covered by 4G, and Zetterberg also confirmed Telenor Norway’s plans to launch VoLTE and “4G+”, with a full rollout expected by the end of next year.
The subsidiary, which accounts for 25 per cent of Telenor Group’s total revenue, is holding the seminar in London today, and has a number of high profile internal speakers at the event, including CEO Berit Svendsen.
In her presentation, Svendsen also focused on data growth, after confirming the company will lose up to NOK550 million ($70 million) from its top line revenue in 2015 following TeliaSonera’s acquisition of Tele2, because of an end to its wholesale agreement with the company.
She said Telenor Norway will look to close the gap from this by focusing on the “huge amount of data in the country that is now following similar patterns we once saw in the US and Asia”.
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