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One somewhat surprising note was the overwhelming success
of ISDN in Norway. Citing the contrast between its huge take-up in Norway and its abysmal failure in the US, Ims
attributed this to timing. In Norway, he suggested, at about the time the Net was catching on in a big way, Telenor
was just beginning to provide ISDN to its customers. "We had basically no alternative when it came to high-speed
access," Ims explained. "There were no cable modems, for example, until six months ago, and that's a
significant difference between us and the States.
"At the moment, in Europe no operator is offering xDSL as a commercial product. I expect, however, that all
of the large operators will be in the market with commercial xDSL by the end of this year. I know Telia and Nokia
have announced that they have signed a deal on delivery of a significant amount of xDSL equipment.
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"But they haven't published any kind of official date for launching it. Though judging from the press announcement,
they will be going for possibly a more aggressive roll out than Telenor would. The main reason for this,"
he concluded, "is they have not had any take-up of ISDN, so they really need this. For us ISDN can really
take care of the bandwidth capacity demand for some time now."
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