The reason for that is there's a an important satellite ground station on Svalbard - it's in an ideal place to communicate with polar-orbiting satellites:
Photographer Christian Hougue produced a really beautiful series on this ground stations called Arctic Technology. He mentioned that the air is some of cleanest in the world, which is a real boon to the equipment they're running.
http://www.soulfood.no/arctic_technology.html#img/arctic_tec...