Intelligent Transport Systems - Telenor

Bjørn Asmundvåg (54) holds his
formal degrees from marketing
and business economics.
1980–1990 he was employed in
Siemens; from 1990 in Telenor
Mobile. Bjørn Asmundvåg has
taken active part in the development
of platforms and businesses
that now constitute the
bases of Telenor’s ITS products
and services, as well as several
other products/services drawing
on the same platforms. He was
for example responsible for the
mobile data services 1990 to
1995, and later for the stablishment
of ELVEG and Transport
Telematikk, mentioned in the
paper.
bjorn.asmundvaag@telenor.com
Einar Flydal (53) is Senior Adviser
working with corporate strategy
at the Telenor headquarters.
He is cand.polit. from the
Univ. of Oslo (UiO), 1983, in
political science, and Master of
Telecom Strategy from the Univ.
of Science and Technology
(NTNU), Trondheim, 2002. Apart
from 1985–1993, when working
with IT in education and with
small IT companies, Flydal has
worked with Telenor in a variety
of fields since 1983. He has also
worked as radio freelancer on
minorities and music, on statistical
indicators at the Chair of
Peace and Conflict Research,
and on work organisation on oil
platforms at the Work Research
Institute, Oslo. His present professional
interests are environment,
CSR, innovation, and ICT.
einar.flydal@telenor.com
Telektronikk 1.2003
ITS Services Development in Telenor –
History and Some Indications on Future
Direction
BJØRN ASMUNDVÅG AND EINAR FLYDAL
Introduction
In this paper we trace the story of ITS – Intelligent
Transport Systems – business development
in Telenor. To understand our concept of ITS,
we refer to our paper “Why should a telco
engage in ITS?” in this issue of Telektronikk:
The term “ITS” is “unscientific” in the sense of
being imprecise and commonsensical. ITS covers
a broad field, mainly denoting informationand
communication technology (ICT) and applications
serving to improve personnel or goods
traffic flow, and will be used here in such a
broad sense. The area of ITS, in some environments
covered by the confusing term of “telematics”
or “road telematics”, has come to constitute
a separate field only gradually.
In the more general picture, ITS is about a transformation
from fixed to mobile omnipresent and
ubiquitous communication, from centralised to
distributed and dispersed computing, and from
embedded content provision to content provision
separated from, loosened from, and – in its extreme
– unrelated to the infrastructure on which
it travels, technically or commercially.
It is since long evident that the impact of this
general evolution upon the traditional telco and
ICT businesses has been, is, and will continue to
be profound. ITS is in this respect just a particular
area of application, bundle of technologies,
or markets that emerge as this transformation
takes place. From such a perspective, the history
of ITS within Telenor may be read as a history
of just some steps along a profound change of
the business.
All new technologies and their applications do
have a beginning. It is a paradox that in a business
using ever more memory and realtively less
paper in its production, history gets ever shorter.
Hence, the beginning is lost in the mist. Our historical
account of ITS in Telenor and its predecessor
the Norwegian Televerket, a directorate
under the national Ministry of Communication,
relies heavily on subjective memory, and not on
any formal research work. As the authors have
both been working in Telenor for quite some
years, and the one has been involved in much of
what is described below, we nevertheless hope
that our story is not too biased. However, as telecom
is a generic, non-application specific technology,
and as the ITS concept is quite broad,
many activities relevant for ITS are not covered
in this paper. Such omissions are due to our
unawareness and do not express any particular
opinion about the initiatives omitted.
The story of what actually happened is much
simpler, both for the reader to make sense as
well as for the writers to depict, when seen
against its historical backdrop. That is where
we begin.
The Large Picture: From
Monopolistic, Integrated and
Fixed Access-Based Welfare
to Competitive, Layered and
Mobile-Based Business
The traditional concept and business model of
telecom was shaped around 150 years ago: The
basic business model of telcos is selling telephony
access between the fixed terminal points
A and B by the minute through a wired closed
circuit between them. Technically as well as
businesswise, this value creation is about selling
timesharing access to infrastructure (the network)
and to a service (speech telephony)
closely interwoven and inseparable from the
physical network.
Our professional forefathers formed the networks
the way technology, experience and
organisational capabilities invited them to: They
started with point-to-point connections which
evolved into star formed shapes, assembling the
individual wiring to each subscriber access point
to a central connection point to provide for connections
all-to-all (the exchange/switch/hub).
These meeting places, where services could be
hooked up, were located where all traffic would
have to pass, i.e. in the center of the town. The
local starshaped access networks got connected.
Junctions (mergers and demergers, or muxes and
de-muxes) were introduced. Now, the access
networks got connected through trunk lines of
higher capacity. Just like irrigation systems,
trunk roads, main railroads, and the main barge
channels in the previous centuries had mimicked
river systems, or the paths of ants, telco networks
followed the same networking model to
carry the application of real time speech between
two endpoints.
As for speech protocol, i.e. when, for what purpose
or how people should talk, it was subject to
advice, but not much control, from the telcos.
(Advice like “To be used only by the Managing
Director”, “Talk slowly and distinctly!”, or
“Always start the conversation by introducing
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