Mobile traffic in Finland: not the future everyone expected

Finland receives a great deal of attention in the mobile space. It has always been an early adopter of new mobile technologies and is often presented as ‘ahead’ of other countries, and therefore as showing us the future. So what are we to make of the recent mobile data traffic figures from the Finnish mobile network operator (MNO) Elisa that show that year-on-year growth has fallen to 0.5% and that absolute traffic volumes have declined for three consecutive quarters?

This article shows that Finland was never really ‘the future’. Nonetheless, the peaking of mobile traffic in Finland can tell us important things about the future of mobile demand in other countries.