Telenor Norway CEO Berit Svendsen believes the country can be a leader in 5G, given its success with 4G and its “highly tech savvy” population.

Speaking to Mobile World Daily, she said “Telenor has the fastest 4G network in the fastest 4G country in the world. Given our modest – but highly tech savvy – population and our challenging topography, that is an achievement we are quite proud of. We intend to keep the ‘leader jersey’ in 5G, as we believe it is key to help digitise Norwegian society and our customers even further.”

She said Norwegian operators have invested heavily into 4G up until now, and need to capitalise on those investments before committing to rolling out 5G.

Svendsen also spoke about the importance of finding businesses cases unique for 5G which cannot be achieved by 4G.

“4G performs extremely well, and we believe many of the so-called 5G use cases can be managed by 4G. Use cases which really require 5G and have a positive business case will emerge, and we are using our 5G pilot to explore this together with our customers.”

“In the early days, the 5G network will naturally have limited area coverage, thus we need to focus on solving local customer problems where 5G can create real value,” she added.