How it started
Telegraph
Telenor was established in 1855 as a state-operated monopoly provider of telegraph services and was named Telegrafverket. The initial planning for a telegraph service in Norway was launched within the Royal Norwegian Navy in 1848. By 1852, the plans were made public and the Parliament of Norway decided to plan for the construction of a telegraph system throughout the country. Televerket began by connecting Christiania (now Oslo) to Sweden (Norway was at that time in a union with Sweden) as well as Christiania and Drammen. By 1857, telegraph services had reached Bergen on the west coast via Sørlandet on the south coast, and by 1871, it had reached Kirkenes on the far north coast. Cable connections were connected to Denmark in 1867 and to Great Britain in 1869. The telegraph was important for merchant marines who could now use the electric telegraph to instantly communicate between different locations, and get an advantage from better logistics.
Telephone
The first telephone service in Norway was established in 1878 between Arendal and Tvedestrand, while the first international telephone service between Christiania and Stockholm was offered in 1893. Automation of the telephone system was started in 1920 and completed in 1985. In 1946, the first Telex service was offered. In 1976, satellite telephone connections to the Norwegian merchant navy, at the time the largest in the world, and to the oil platforms in the North Sea were established. This was the start of Inmarsat Satellite Communication which was the foundation to digitalising the telephone network between 1980–1985.
Televerket opened its first manual mobile telephone system in 1966. This was replaced with the automatic NMT system in 1981 and upgraded to the enhanced NMT-900 service in 1986. Norway was the first country to get an automatic mobile telephone system. The digital GSM system was established in 1993. The 3G/UMTS system began full operation in 2004.
Telenor and Huawei conducted a successful test of 5G with 70 Gbit/s speeds in a lab environment.
From Wikipedia’s article on Telenor, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2