ITU: Finland could still cut prices of fixed broadband connections

Finland remains one of world’s cheaper countries in telecommunications

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Finland would still have room to reduce the prices of fixed broadband internet services, according to a report by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union comparing data and telecommunications services.
      The ITU found that in comparison with other countries, Finland has higher prices specifically in wired broadband services, which declined in price by only a couple of per cent last year compared with 2008.
     
The ITU includes in its price basket for information and communications technology (ICT) services prices for mobile telephone, broadband, and landline services, all of which have declined on a worldwide scale in recent years.
      “Fixed broadband services showed the largest price fall, an average 42 per cent, compared to 25 and 20 per cent in mobile cellular and fixed telephone services respectively”, says Sami Al Basheer Al Morshid, director of ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau in Geneva.
     
The cheapest telecommunications services are in China and Singapore. Inexpensive countries also include the Untied States, Denmark, Norway, Britain and Iceland. Finland is 12th out of 160.
      Mobile telephone calls are cheapest in Hong Kong, Norway, and Denmark. The lowest prices for fixed broadband services are in China, Singapore, Denmark, the USA, Britain Switzerland and Sweden. Stockholm and Oslo have taken the new TeliaSonera 4G mobile phone services into use.
     In the view of the ITU, the spread of the new mobile standard depends on how services develop in Sweden and Norway.
     
Al Basheer noted that the 3G mobile phone standard took much longer to become widespread than had been expected. He added that the expansion of the new system depends on the new services and the prices.
      He expects operators to increase their investments especially in wireless broadband, in spite of present economic problems. Income of operators will increasingly come from the transfer of data and not voice.
      Prices of mobile telephone calls in Finland have come down by 10 per cent, and those in Sweden by as much as 20 per cent, but in Sweden the starting prices have been higher. In the report, a comparison is made for the price of 25 telephone calls and 30 text messages. Prices for landline calls in Finland have also gone down by nearly 10 per cent.


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  International Telecommunication Union

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