Mobile News

The Finnish market continues to look frostily on prepaid services. Despite being the world’s most penetrated market at 78% in December 2000, this has been achieved mainly through contracts. Finns do not have very much of a credit culture. Credit card penetration is quite low and the financial control offered by prepaid services has proved less attractive here.

Sonera is the only operator to offer a prepaid service and targets the service at a niche market. In February 2001, Sonera launched a new Recharging Card to enable talktime to be loaded onto existing subscriptions. This seems to be a move towards convergence of prepaid and post-paid rather than marketing a distinct prepaid service.

Sonera launched its GPRS service on December 11, 2000, and it can be added as a supplementary feature to the majority of Sonera’s GSM subscriptions.

Second operator Radiolinja does not have a prepaid service, but instead offers customers various features in a prepaid mindset. These include regular credit updates and SMS balance reminders when users reach a certain limit. Users can set a predetermined limit and after this limit is exceeded calls will be barred. A thaw is possible, however and there have been indications that Radiolinja could be considering offering prepaid in the near future.