scte long read
The fibre roll out has taken on different forms all over Europe, and progress has generally been steady, if characterised by a few peaks and troughs. Promoted by the FTTH Council Europe, INCA, the SCTE and various other national and international initiatives and funding programmes, the roll out was accelerated by Covid then hampered by post-Covid inflation, geopolitics and spooked investors. However, in spite of all sorts of unforeseen geopolitical events each territory has, on balance, made impressive gains year-on-year. As seems often to be the case, the UK attracts the headlines, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not so good; late stage capitalism being what it is, the race for market share and flood of optimistic (and opportunistic) investment has resulted in a disappointing subscriber take up rate and amid moves to consolidate, especially recently, there are also depressing numbers of smaller companies going into administration. On balance though, the roll out is broadly considered a success. Across the North Sea however, quietly and effectively going about its profitable, modest, socialist business, is the Nordic region, and Finland in particular. Without fanfare, involving partners as equals, evolving from a ground zero technical basis in the 90s and expanding its fibre network from scratch, Finland is a fascinating example of technology in transition and how to do it by building consensus, working with flat hierarchical structures and without drama.
It is due to this unusual beginning that Finland, considering its small population has a fiercely competitive telecoms landscape, with three main providers “all trying to be nationwide,” said Hanno, all vying for customers – Elisa, DNA and Telia Finland, 129 smaller providers, as well as the 15 member companies in the Finnet group. That’s an awful lot of infrastructure for just 5.6m people. “And you can still see that history in today’s telecom service provider space,” said Hanno, “one example being Lounea.” On the way to the FTTH show in Amsterdam last year, your dozy writer was on a crowded train, deep in thought and somehow missed hundreds of people alighting at the RAI stop and only realised her mistake some miles out of Amsterdam, almost alone in an empty carriage on the way to some other city altogether. The only other person on the train was Veli-Matti Viitanen, CEO of Lounea, Finland’s fourth largest ISP, and together we spent the time as the scenery whizzed by, discussing the Finnish telecoms landscape, and the germination of this article began. By the time we turned back later that morning, some 60 miles away up the sunny Dutch coast, we were firm friends and happily swapping email addresses. Finland currently has 68% of its homes passed, around 2m homes, so that’s past the halfway mark, with the hardest parts still to reach. “We don’t have 100% coverage at this day, but much of the country’s population is quite dispersed, so building networks everywhere in Finland is very expensive.” Veli-Matti explained. “There are some competitors that they say they will invest €100m in Finland’s networks this year. What we see is that there’s no room for build-ups in Finland, so it will mean overbuilding”. Isn’t that a gamble? We’ve seen in the UK how how altnets have had their fingers burned that way. Veli-Matti nodded. “I think they will have to remake their Excel spreadsheets. If they have calculated that they will get the money back, there’s no way. If you’re overbuilding, you can’t get business from that.” All those competitors One executive who preferred not to be named told me, “We are experiencing a price war that started last year. From the consumer’s point of view, it’s pretty good right now. I pay €18 a month for my mobile contract, a flat rate. I have unlimited data, all the SMS, all the voice I can even ever use and with 100 meg mobile bandwidth,
Hanno Narjus, CEO at Teleste agrees. “Finland’s telecom market is partly peculiar due to its long-time history, where the state-owned PTT never had a telecom monopoly. The bigger cities built their own wireline networks – it wasn’t the state PTT. And eventually the biggest “metropolitan telecom operators” started to build their own mobile networks.” Meanwhile, PTT unwittingly built nationwide coverage when they built the early mobile networks. This is one of the reasons why Finland was an innovation leader back in the 1970s until 3G/4G era in mobile networks and mobile phones; the foundations were there for Nokia to dominate the mobile handset market in the 90s. Such competitive dynamics encouraged investment and innovation (compared to the monopolistic PTT market). Jarmo’s shared his memories. “When Nokia was selling everyone mobile phones, I was living in Manchester. It was 1995. It was interesting to be a Finn in the UK at the time, because everybody knew what Nokia was; it was something which we were obviously very proud of. We managed to open the mobile business in Europe in a very broad way with Nokia. And of course, Ericsson, a Swedish company, was also very dominant.” He went on, “Finland was very much a mobile country in the 1990s. While Nokia was dominating the mobile phone market, we believed mobile broadband could serve the whole country. It made sense at the time. Finland is geographically large and sparsely populated. Outside Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and a few other cities, there are vast rural areas — Lapland alone covers nearly half the country but has only around 170,000 residents. “So we focused on mobile — and gradually dismantled much of the old copper infrastructure, especially in rural regions, because it was too expensive to maintain. Then we realised we had removed our fixed-line safety net.” Hanno elaborated, “British Telecom and other nationalised industries had a really protected monopoly to invest and build nationwide coverage of telephone infrastructure, and of course, fixed telephone at that point of time. We never had that and PTT formally built networks only outside of the bigger cities. They were building networks in low-density population areas, whereas every city had its own telephone company.”
It is also relatively unusual; there is no copper legacy network to worry about in Finland.
Finland’s backstory
Jarmo Matilainen is CEO of Finnet, a 100-year-old non-profit trade organisation whose 15 members are Finnish local IT and ISP companies, engaged in lobbying, co-operative and promotional activities across Finland. What is it that makes Finland so singular? “We started as a mobile-first nation,” Jarmo explained. “We dismantled copper earlier than many countries. Then we realised fibre was essential — and accelerated quickly. Now we are balancing private investment, cooperative ownership, national resilience and market consolidation — all while building hundreds of thousands of fibre connections annually. Finland may have been late to fibre but we are catching up fast.”
Volume 48 No.2 MAY 2026
43
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker