OSLO, Norway, October 7, 2003 - Statoil Detaljhandel AS, the Norwegian service station operator owned by the oil company Statoil and the Swedish supermarket chain ICA, today announced that it is using Cisco wireless local area network (WLAN) technology to create hotspots at 300 of its 490 sites country-wide. The new service - Norway's most ambitious WLAN project to date- creates a significant value-added service to its customers, was implemented through Norway's largest telecommunications provider, Telenor.
The initiative builds on Statoil Detaljhandel's successful retail services, which include in-store products such as groceries, fast food and soft drinks. These are increasingly important sources of revenue for the Norwegian service station operators who are facing a fiercely competitive market. Along with the hot spots, Statoil Detaljhandel will sell its customers Internet access cards to facilitate their use of the service.
Jon Erik Bjore, head of IT at Statoil Detaljhandel in Norway, said: "Cisco has worked successfully both with us and with Telenor in the past and was able to provide state-of-the-art technology that has the potential of having an important impact on our profitability - at a price which each service station could easily afford without putting pressure on their capital expenditure."
The 300 service stations in the deployment are those that have existing DSL connections and can therefore provide sufficient bandwidth to support WLAN. Each is equipped with Cisco Aironet® 1200 Series Access Points, which allow Statoil customers to log onto Telenor's wireless portal service with their wireless devices.
"We strongly believe that corporations will view wireless networks as a natural prerequisite for doing business. Telenor's innovative new WLAN service will provide companies with high-speed wireless freedom, combined with a secure VPN client, extending their ability to cooperate and exchange current information, anytime, anywhere", says Anders Hauglie-Hanssen, executive vice president business communications at Telenor.
"Here is a clear example of WLAN technology being seen as a low-cost solution for achieving maximum differentiation in a highly competitive market," Massimo Migliuolo, vice president, Worldwide Mobile Operations, Cisco Systems, said: "In terms of scale it is a first for the service station industry but it certainly will not be the last. Many other industries, too, are waking up to the potential benefits of providing hotspot services to their customers."
