Europe : TeliaSonera Sweden is now sharply increasing the speed of data traffic throughout its GSM network by introducing EDGE technology, which allows fast and easy use of mobile services of the future.

Inset is Marie Ehrling, President of TeliaSonera Sweden quoted below.

TeliaSonera Sweden is also increasing the operating reliability of the entire network and expanding coverage to 90 percent of Sweden. The build-out involves an investment of approximately SEK 1 billion, distributed over a four-year period.

TeliaSonera's network has already received awards for a number of years for being the best GSM network in Sweden, for having the best GPRS, and in 2004, for also having the best overall 3G service. Today, people expect a lot of mobile communications, and they will expect even more as a growing number of services are introduced and become even better. The build-out will be implemented over a four-year period and involve the following:

-Increasing coverage from 70 percent to more than 90 percent of Sweden's land area, making TeliaSonera Sweden's mobile network the obvious alternative for today's NMT customers.

-Introducing EDGE technology throughout the entire GSM network. This will enable transmission speeds of up to 210/105 kbps, which is four times faster than today's data rate. Upstream speeds (from mobile handsets) will also be faster than 3G rates, making it easy to send image and audio files.

- Increasing the operating reliability and capacity of the network so it can manage a heavier traffic load than today's.

"We want to offer the best and most reliable mobile telephony services and mobile surfing, in a class of their own, to our customers all over Sweden. Good network coverage and capacity are a matter of course for our customers, wherever they live and are active in Sweden. With the build-out, today's NMT customers will become satisfied GSM customers. The mobile Internet has major growth potential, provided there is high network capacity. Internet services will soon become as obvious on mobile terminals and they are on computers today," says Marie Ehrling, President of TeliaSonera Sweden.

Due to the planned GSM build-out, TeliaSonera Sweden will not bid on the National Post and Telecom Agency's licence for the digital 450 network, which is intended to be an alternative mobile technology for today's NMT customers.

"TeliaSonera Sweden gives priority to making things simple for customers. The alternative NMT technology covered by the new licence requires special handsets. Nor does digital 450 technology work together with GSM and 3G. Furthermore, there are far greater possibilities to use a telephone with 3G and GSM/EDGE in other countries than a digital 450 handset. We have chosen EDGE because it allows our customers to use the mobile Internet in any part of the network, wherever they happen to be. Today, 100,000 GSM/EDGE phones are already being used in the mobile network," says Marie Ehrling.