NetCom (Norway)

» see netcom.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

NetCom GSM AS was put together in 1989 by an unlikely group: Orkla and Nora Industrier on the Norwegian side, with Jan Stenbeck's Kinnevik from Sweden supplying the appetite for going after a state telephone monopoly. The Ministry of Transport awarded the license in 1991 over three other applicants. Construction started in March 1993, a month ahead of Televerket's own GSM build, and the commercial launch came on 27 September 1993. Norway had one telephone company that morning and two by the evening.

The snowball did not melt. NetCom led the Norwegian mobile market for its first two years, helped by the then-novel trick of selling the handset below cost, and in 1995 it sold phones for one krone and finished the year with 233,351 subscribers against 70,000 the year before. Market share peaked somewhere around 55 percent in 1994 and slid every year after that as the incumbent woke up, down to 35 percent by 1996 and 30 percent by 1998. The company listed on the Oslo exchange in May 1996 and brought Norway its first prepaid card in October 1997, which is the one genuine first in its history that has a date and a second source behind it.

Telia took it over in 2000, lifting its stake to 95 percent and taking the shares off the exchange, and from then on NetCom was a brand sitting on top of somebody else's balance sheet. It won a UMTS license that November and opened that network a year later, and crossed a million customers in August 2002. It kept running under its own name for sixteen more years, through the Telia and Sonera merger and a change to Telia's purple in 2011, and the name only became expendable when NetCom bought Tele2 Norway and had to integrate two customer bases anyway. Abraham Foss made the call before Christmas 2015. E24 broke it on 26 February 2016, and on 1 March the signs came down.

~ the case file ~

~ the monopoly break ~

September 1993 deserves to be stated precisely, because European telecom liberalization gets told as a story about Brussels directives when it was also a story about a few specific companies arriving before the directives did. Televerket had been the only way to make a phone call in Norway. GSM was the opening, because a second digital network could be built alongside the first instead of having to be prised out of it, and Norway handed out its second license in 1991 and had competition on the air by September 1993.

Trygve Hegnar, writing in Kapital, gave the venture about as much chance as a snowball in hell. The phrase stuck hard enough that when a history of the company was published in 2003 it was titled after it. The old logo was two talking heads, which turned up in shop windows and on television for two decades, and the slogan under them was "fremtiden er trådløs", the future is wireless. A challenger's advertising always has to sell the idea of choice before it can sell the minutes.

~ the switch day ~

The ending was a scheduled event rather than a collapse, which makes it rarer than it sounds. E24 reported the decision on the morning of 26 February 2016 under a headline that translates as "after 22 years it is over", and the mechanics were set for 1 March: on that day the shop signs changed, and so did the operator name showing at the top of roughly a million Norwegian handsets. Nobody lost service. Nobody had to port a number. The brand simply stopped, on a date somebody had put in a calendar.

Telia kept its other Norwegian brands, Chess among them, so the decision was about this one name. netcom.no today is a 301 to telia.no, and the Telia homepage it lands on contains the string NetCom exactly zero times. The mail record for netcom.no still points at smtp.netcom.no, and that host still resolves, ten years after the signs came down.

~ a different monopoly ~

Norway's carrier fight is not one I lived through. In 1993 I was nine years old in Turkey and five years off my first modem, and when I did get online in 1998 it was over a dial-up line from a state telephone company of our own. Turkey got its own mobile competition in roughly the same window, with two operators running on the incumbent's network years before either of them held a license in its own name, so the shape rhymes without the dates lining up. I learned the NetCom name long afterward, from the outside, as the thing that used to be written on Telia's buildings.

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