I’ve had plenty of rants about Norwegian broadband (or lack thereov) over the past 25 years. It’s a bit of a long story, but the gist of it is that during the 90’s there was this one company (Telenor) which had practical monopoly on telecom (it was the private remnant of what used to be part of the government), and of course they didn’t want to develop broadband 8nfrastructure as the made shitloads of money by selling ISDN at the time. Broadband was available in the biggest cities only, and even there it was limited. And the punchline of that joke was that when I was on dialup I had to pay by the minute. During that time, hearing about not having to pay by the minute in the US sounded like paradise to me.

But luckily, competition happened, and Telenor realized they had to allow modernization or be left out of the market entirely. Small communities could sign up to have broadband “delivered”, and once enough people had signed up for an ISP to considet it profitable, digging would start. Today, twenty years later, I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out. I live practically in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny industrial town sqeezed to fit into the terrain, where three of the cardinal directions are blocked by mountains and the fourth being a fjord. And I have 1gbit both up and down.