Finland

+358

During its monopoly days Finland had a telecomms policy similar to that of post-divestiture US. Local monopolies and one long distance and overseas monopoly -- Sonera.

When competition was introduced, the local companies, e.g. Helsinki Telephone, formed the alliance Puhelinyhtiöt -- Finnet Group (previously called TeleGroup) -- to compete with the former government national carrier Sonera (Tele for short).

The independent, second GSM carrier Radiolinja is partly owned by Finnish investors and partly by regional telecomms.

Telia bought 75% of third carrier Telivo in August 1996 (news). Telivo has the third (DCS-only) Finnish DCS1800 license. It is very likely that Telia, which likes to define its home-market as the Baltic area, will try to win DCS licenses in Denmark and Norway too; the aim being to create a pan-Nordic mobile network.

Numbering plan

Finland used 9 as trunk prefix, e.g. Helsinki was 90, Åland was 928 etc. On October 12 1996 Finland changed over to European standards. There were 74 area codes, now there are only 13 left. The biggest -- Lappi 016 -- covers almost one third of the country. No parallel running for international traffic!

Telecom Administrations Centre (= FCC, Oftel or PTS)
Lots of more information on telecom in general in Finnish.
``Tele'' in Sweden.
Finish GSM tariffs (real cute!).

Last modification: Tue Feb 4 21:12:17 1997 by Sam Spens Clason (mail, www)