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I can use my laptop with the hotspot in my mobile. I can do everything for €18 a month.” She continued, “However, from an operator’s perspective, it’s eating up the margins. It’s not easy. When one of the three majors decides to suddenly dump the prices, that usually takes maybe a year or two for the operators to recover their margins. Margins were hit hard at the end of last year.” Outside of the metropolitan areas, in the absence of fixed infrastructure, most people rely on their broadband data in Finland purely on the mobile data. Hanno says he is a good example, living outside the city of Turku, which is Finland’s fourth largest city. “I don’t have anything else but mobile subscription for my broadband data, and a modem that works with it. I have nothing else, because nothing else is available.” Just as in the UK, weighing up the commercial viability of connecting remote areas is ongoing, and Hanno is not optimistic. While the competitive landscape affords Hanno and his neighbours limitless data, “My prophecy is that we are a big country and there are huge areas with really low population density. Hence, there will never be fixed infrastructure nationwide. Ever.” Jarmo said, “Actually, there is something which is also very, very strange in Finland. Many of those mobile base stations, which are located here in rural areas don’t have fibre connections yet, so they offer 5G with using some radio link. That’s something also which we want to change: every station should have fibre, and when they build fibre to the mobile base station they can easily build fibre to the people in the same region, to companies, to farms and other businesses because then they have a good business case. It’s very profitable to build that way. But DNA and Elisa haven’t built it because it’s quite expensive and they have to be sure that they get the money back because they need to keep their shareholders happy.” Again, profit works against people and in a cooperative environment, where collaboration and stability is so valued, this is jarring and won’t be helping remote homes in Finland. Fibre In The Room The biggest competition to get subscribers is among those living in MDUs. In Finland MDUs are organised as a housing
association in and of itself; every five years a tender goes up for each association for telecoms companies to offer the best deal possible. Veli-Matti pointed to MDUs as the biggest pinch point of competition in Finland now, given the sparse population, complex legacy in towns and remote nature of its rural inhabitants. “We are experiencing fierce competition because in Finland our customers think that mobile is enough for them. A lot of the time it is really enough. But further down the line, when people need more data, better speeds, it won’t be. We’ll need to get fibre inside the buildings and get the coverage around the apartments so that we will have fibre and Wi-Fi coverage literally in every room. The need for capacity hasn’t stopped, so it will grow, and grow indefinitely.” It speaks to the nature of competition here that Finnish companies are now aming for Fibre In The Room. Fibre is included as part of all new builds in MDUs in Finland, and the three telco companies DNA, Telia and Elisa compete heavily to win contracts with housing associations as their customers and the associated footprint are very valuable. “In Finland, it’s a peculiar market,” Hanno explained. “If a housing association decides to move from Telia to DNA, then it’s up to DNA to organise the broadband connectivity from the basement where the fibre is coming to all the households, all the flats, not just an individual household. That’s why there are there are more DOCSIS subscribers.” DOCSIS, surprisingly, is a growth area in Finland, not huge volumes but “when DNA or Telia win a housing association, coax
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MAY 2026 Volume 48 No.2
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