Empirical Insights on the Evolution of the Finnish Mobile Market

This paper carried out an extensive empirical study on mobile service usage in Finland. The newly develop handset-based research platform was utilized in the analysis. A typical Finnish panelist spends 33 minutes / day with smartphonc. Most of this time is allocated on voice calls (33%) and messaging (24%). Younger people and men arc still the most active users of smartphoncs. The Finnish market has developed particularly in the use of packet data and person-to-person services. Handset bundling has indirectly driven these trends because more data, voice and SMS pricing plans have emerged in the market. Handset bundling reflects in the increased use of operator-specific clients, too. ARPU levels correlate clearly with data, voice and SMS service usage, whereas no clear correlation between ARPU and offline service usage exists. People still consider the pricing and technical implementation (configuration) of the mobile Internet and email as bottlenecks for mobile Internet usage. WLAN traffic represents already a significant share of aggregated traffic volume, though the number of VVLAN-capable phones in the panel is small. In general data services are evolving towards multimedia and infotainment, getting closer to the fixed Internet. Multimedia is actively explored, particularly smartphonc camera. Indicative questionnaire results suggest that mobile e-commcrce might soon hit the mass-market domain.