Although with only 5.3 million people the Finnish market is small, Finnish consumers and companies have proven to be quick to adopt new technologies. The telecommunications market in Finland is fully liberalized – no licenses are needed, except for digital television networks and building mobile networks. Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications is responsible for licensing.
The fact that Finland was among the first to open its telecommunications market has resulted in low mobile tariffs; according to a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study comparing average mobile phone charges across the OECD countries, in 2007, Finland ranked number one for the third year in a row. Finland has been a pioneer in popularizing mobile phones. At the beginning of 2000 it was the country with the highest penetration rate in the world: 65% of Finns were already using mobile phones. The penetration rate now stands at 100% and there are nearly 5.2 million subscribers.
Since July 2003, mobile customers have been able to switch operators while preserving their mobile numbers. This has made switching operators more attractive to customers, and thus substantially increased competition between service providers, in the already highly competitive telecommunications market. With an Internet penetration rate of 79%, Finland is among the top nations in Internet use. It is also the world's leading country in electronic banking.
The two major operators in the fixed-line telecommunications market are Elisa Communications and TeliaSonera. Most smaller Finnish telephone companies operate under the Finnet group, which is the third largest player in the fixed line market. The major players are facing increasingly strong competition from newer providers of fixed-line, mobile, and Internet services. Third-generation mobiles are foreseen to become more widespread in Finland. One of the reasons is the ending of the ban on “tie-in” sales of phones and services.
On June 22, 2005, the Government granted an operating license to Digita Oy to build a new digital mobile communications network, using Flash-OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) technology. It will be the first time in the world this technology will be put to extensive use in mobile networks.
In 2005, there were over 1.2 million broadband connections to households in Finland. This was more than in other European Union (EU) countries, on average. The goal of national broadband strategy is to allow every Finn to have access to high-speed, easy-to-use, and affordable data transfer connections and to make Finland a European leader in availability and use of high-speed telecommunications. In 2006, the growth rate was 22%, and by the end of the year, Finland had a total of 1.428,000 broadband subscriptions, including both households and corporate customers. By the end of September 2007, the number of broadband subscriptions had reached 1.574,000.