Malin Frenning, President of Business Area Broadband Services, received an honorary doctorate at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden in November 2011. The program was held over November 11-12 and included the doctorate conferement and also lectures given by Malin Frenning on the theme “The digital society”.
Several important factors lie behind the award of this honorary degree:- earlier in 2011, Malin was named the most powerful woman executive in the Swedish business community by Veckans Affärer, Sweden's leading business magazine, and she has become a role model for all young female engineers as a result.
The following is part of Malin Frenning’s lecture on ”The digital society”.
It’s a pleasure to be here with you today. My name is Malin Frenning and I am head of a business area within TeliaSonera called Broadband Services. In terms of turnover and number of employees - 40 billion SEK and 14.000 employees - Broadband Services would make it to the Large Cap list on the Stockholm stock exchange – and we are larger than a company like Boliden
TeliaSonera consists of three business areas, and together we serve 150 million customers in 20 countries, ranging from Norway in the west to Nepal in the east.
I work in a fantastic and very exciting industry. In fact, I can’t think of any other industry that changes with the same pace and speed of development. Let me give you an example.
Only last week, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first generation mobile networks, called NMT (or Nordic Mobile Telephony). Yes, it was actually here in Stockholm that modern mobile telephony was born 30 years ago through the co-operation between TeliaSonera and Ericsson. The Nordic NMT-system was groundbreaking, as it provided the inhabitants of the Nordic countries with a new means of communication. The standard we built it on paved the way for GSM and modern mobile communication technology, which now serves a community of more than 5 billion users worldwide. It is a remarkable achievement that no one could ever dream of.
In my industry, speed is measured in bits and bytes. Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of bits and bytes, but let me put it into perspective. In 1981, the [transmission] speed in the NMT network was 1 kBit/second. In the forth generation mobile networks that TeliaSonera launched as the world’s first at the end of 2009, speeds are close to 100 Mbit/second.
What does this mean? Well, it’s an increase of 100 000 times in 30 years. If we had experienced the same pace of development in the car industry, we would today drive our Volvos at 20 million kilometres per hour. [Which might not necessarily be a good thing]. And applied to the aviation industry, this means that I would be able to fly from my native Luleå to the office in Stockholm in 0,04 seconds.
Back then, in 1981, a mobile telephone weighed several kilos and cost a smaller fortune. You carried it in a big bag and you would only pick it up if it rang or if you had to make a call. Today, we keep our mobile phones, which are actually more like small computers than phones, in our pockets or hands all the time. They are widely available and affordable. We use them not primarily to call, but to send messages, stay in touch on Facebook and other social media, surf the web and watch tv,. We keep them at hand 24 hrs a day.
I think that it would have been pretty hard to imagine all this back in 1981.
This development is actually mirrored in the transformation of my own company. In 1981, TeliaSonera consisted of a range of small state-run telecoms agencies. They all had monopoly in their respective country and provided fixed telephony and fax services. A customer was not a customer but a subscriber of telephony services.
Today, we’re Europe’s fifth largest operator providing our customers with telecom services like broadband internet connections, TV-services, games and video conferences.
And since 1981, the world has entered the information society, or the digital society, where we are connected at all times. To me, the digital society signifies two things.
Firstly, that communication services have gone from exclusive and expensive, to something widely available and an essential part of our daily lives. I guess that few of us in this room can imagine being without e-mail, internet access or our mobile phones for more than a few hours.
In the digital society, companies, hospitals, schools and banks all rely on communications to run their day-to-day activities. I would be so bold as to argue that if you remove digital from society, society would not work.
I also think that the digital society is for the better of mankind and that it makes the world a better place. Plain and simple. Again, let me illustrate with an example. Just a year ago, TeliaSonera’s subsidiary in Nepal, Ncell, rolled out the world’s highest located mobile network in the Himalayas. Trekkers and climbers can now stay in touch with family and friends and call for emergency and rescue in case of an accident. In fact, the world’s highest tweet ever was done from the top of Mount Everest by English mountaineer Kenton Cool in May this year.
It’s not only the mountaineers that can use our 3G network in the Himalayas. It has also provided possibilities for change and development for the local communities in the Everest region, which previously had very limited possibilities to communicate with the outside world.
And we all know how important communications were during the recent events in Northern Africa and the Middle East. As a representative of the industry, I take pride in the fact that our services actually supports the development of democracy.
These are only a few examples of how, by connecting people and providing the possibility to communicate regardless of time and place, digital actually creates a better society with more possibilities for all.
My second point is that the digital society is about demand and - related to what I said in the beginning - the fast pace of development. My boss, TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg has a favourite expression to describe this combination: The appetite for bandwidth is unlimited.
By this, he means that the more capacity and networks we provide, the more our customers will use, and that the demand is endless. We are actually so fortunate that everything we produce is being consumed. Few other industries have the same luxury.
And this is the very core of the digital society: As more and more information is being digitalised and transmitted through the networks, the more we need to build and invest.
Today, movies, music, video meetings and games are passed through the networks at ever increasing speeds while more and new devices are being connected such as tablets, game consoles, smartphones and TV-sets.
Where will this end? Well, we don’t really know and I question whether there really is an end. According to Cisco, global internet traffic has increased eight times in the past five years and will increase fourfold over the next five years. (Source: Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology 2010-2015)
This is primarily driven by video and moving images. Already the next year, internet video will account for half of consumers’ internet traffic. My company alone is renting out 6000 movies on-line every day in Sweden. And this shows no signs of slowing down. On the contrary. Soon we’ll be watching films in 3D, playing high-resolution computer games and video chat in HD - All on-line and all of which consumes bandwidth - a lot of it.
Our job is to ensure that there is enough capacity to cater for this development. That there are networks capable of providing adequate levels of speed, performance and capacity Therefore, in the coming three years, we will invest 5 billion SEK in Sweden in fibre networks. Indeed, it’s a lot of money. And it also requires that you make an up-front investment to connect to this fiber network. So why should you?
Imagine a family in a house in Sweden somewhere – let’s say in Luleå They all have a need to socialize with relatives and friends in other places, enjoy entertaining like TV, movies etc at home – starting an exciting online game session with friends and – not to forget facilitating the domestic chores by having a set of home electronics constantly connected. Are you with me – imagine two TV sets streaming exciting HD films in 3 D in the media room in this house –at the same time Mom is in the middle of a video conference with business partners in the US. The kids are having a group of friends over in the basement playing online from four computers simultaneously, at the same time they are connected to WLAN with IPads and smartphones and using YouTube/Spotify and of course video chatting with absent friends. And finally Dad is keeping an eye on the digital information given from the devices in the kitchen – refrigerator – time to buy more milk - the potato peeler – all potatoes peeled for - and at the same time the temperature status in the sauna –just turned on for the evening. A family who needs and desire to be connected in order to facilitate and enjoy their life even more. I’ll promise you this family is definitely in need of a fibre connection
So - more and more devices are connected to the Internet: the computer, TV, smartphones, tablets, TV games and many more. And I feel strongly that it is a necessity for us as individuals as well as for Sweden as a nation to keep the digital society evolving even further.
For the good of all of us. Thank you.