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He traveled to the UMTS station at Longyearbyen, Svalbard's largest community, on the island of Spitzbergen, for the recent 3G launch. The environment is breathtaking, says Aanensen. "Once you have a look at the fantastic scenery here, you can't help but want to send home pictures and video clips of the nature."

Aanensen opened the UMTS network on Tuesday, March 15, with a call from the Telenor office in Longyearbyen to a colleague at the company's headquarters in Fornebu, Norway. Bjørn Amundsen, director of coverage at Telenor Mobil, was also on Svalbard for the event.

Amundsen says that while offering the option to share images of the splendor with friends and family is a great perk for the 10,000 tourists who visit the archipelago each year, residents of Longyearbyen are sure to enjoy the higher speeds and extended access as well.

"It's important for Telenor to offer the same availability in northern Norway that we provide in Tromsø and Oslo," Amundsen says. "Now we can sit in Longyearbyen and have a mobile video conference."

The Ericsson-supplied UMTS station gives 3G coverage to the 1800 residents of Longyearbyen. The extended coverage also benefits Arctic researchers at the University Center in Svalbard and is important for industries and businesses in the north. Ericsson has also upgraded the GSM network on the island with speed-enhancing EDGE technology

To inaugurate that, Aanensen took a 60km snowmobile excursion to Temple Fjord, where the Noorderlicht, a Dutch schooner and hotel-boat, is locked in the ice for most of the year. Before hooking up to the GSM network a few months ago, the Noorderlicht’s crew and guests relied on a satellite phone for communication.

A week earlier a polar bear tore off the seat of a scooter parked outside while the driver was inside the boat. The man and the scooter, however, made it back unscathed.

Svalbard has had access to GSM since 1996, but until January 2004 the network in Longyearbyen did not even have GPRS. In January 2004, however, installation of a 1440km cable from Harstad in northern Norway to Svalbard was completed. More than 100km of the cable, known as "the fiber," runs 2m under the ocean bed.

Telenor aims to provide 3G coverage to all communities in Norway with more than 200 inhabitants by 2007. To date 2.82 million Norwegians are covered by the UMTS network.