Finnish telecom industry – going to hell?

The biggest telecom operators are giving bad service. My current operator is Elisa and I am started to get pissed of their poorly working Internet connection. Packet loss of around 50% for several days makes the connection pretty useless. And this is not the first time. Why they can’t get fixed fiber optic connection working reliably. This technology should be pretty reliable when used correctly. Are they using crappy technology, is the technical competence good enough or has management managed to mess up the thing to point things can’t work. Can anyone who knows the company well tell what’s wrong there?

Me having so many problems during the last almost a year with their service, it is hard to trust that the network work when you need it. I think their slogan should be “From networking to not working – Elisa”. And if you try to reach their service to report the problem you need to wait half on hour on the phone listening to crappy sounding music, notices how you can do things easier through their web page and empty promises that call will be answered soon in few minutes.
To be fair their be fair their biggest competitor Sonera gives pretty equally bar service. I had their service around on year ago. They pulled fiber to the house and provided ADSL connection to the apartment. Some of the problems were caused by providing “incompatible ADSL modem” with the connection and the giving bad technical advice (wrong configuration advice). Anyways their advertised to be more reliable service was pretty bad compared to my previous ADSL from Saunalahti that was not excellent but worked more reliably (service started to get worse when Elisa bought that company).

The internet access marketing of the biggest operators seems to concentrate on getting long service agreements, like 12 months or more. Maybe it is the way to keep the customers for some time, because they can’t change easily for some time even of the service is crappy. Many people get pissed off during the agreement time and are prepared to change the operator as soon as the agreement period ends. And they end up with other crappy operator they change again. When taking account the costs for operators for opening the connection (cost nothing to customer but real money to operator) plus many free months they give to their new customers, it is no wonder why this business is not making that great money as it could.

And Nokia has problems too. Stock price is dropping fast. And they just gave announcement that they probably are making less money this year then they earlier expected. No wonder because they don’t seem to have any amazing products for the market.
I am just wondering when Nokia dropped from the leader to market follower. Nokia has been great in innovating new things, but not so great in bringing those innovations to their product line. Nokia for example had working prototype of iPhone like touch mobile phone ten years ago, but for some reason they were not able to make it to the markets of brave enough to start marketing this kind of groundbreaking product. Now they are market followers, just releasing quote crappy new phone models. The comments Anssi Vanjoki gives to press do not give a good picture of him or his leadership. Nokia is the biggest maker of cellular phones, and it also seems to be true that when things get big enough everything works slowly and innovation capabilities drop.

And then Digita is planning to kill their @450 wireless broadband service (the only one that covers most of the country) and their DVB-H mobile TV broadcasting. By the way the WLAN networks available on some buses and trains use @450 network to get your data from WLAN base station to Internet. If this @450 network is suddenly killed those services will stop working as well.

12 Comments

  1. tomi says:

    Elisa finally fixed the problem on their size and my internet connection works again.

    Reply
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  5. Tomi says:

    Nokia’s New CEO: Challenges
    http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/09/12/nokia%E2%80%99s-new-ceo-challenges/

    The company has finally elected a new CEO to replace OPK, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. 43-year-old Stephen Elop’s bona fides are in order: As President of Microsoft’s Business Division (since January 2008) he was in charge of the Microsoft Office money machine and was part of the company’s “Leadership Team”. He was well-paid (the 2009 proxy pegged him at $4.8M, excluding longer-term items) and rumor placed him at the top of the short list to succeed Ballmer…

    Reply
  6. Tomi says:

    Hopefully the business is getting better for Nokia in the future…

    News: http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/news/2010/09/nokia_ceo_blames_problems_on_complacency_2021363.html

    Nokia’s Chairman of the Board, Jorma Ollila, has blamed the company’s recent difficulties on leadership problems.

    Ollila expects new CEO Stephen Elop to bring the company new vitality and inspirational leadership.

    He was named three weeks ago to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who was blamed for the company’s setbacks.

    Reply
  7. Tomi says:

    I must admit that lately Elisa has been doing well in their Internet connection. Not much to complain on their service at the moment.
    I am pretty happy with their Elisa viihde service that provides TV, IPTV, and fast Internet connection (100 Mbit/s).

    Reply
  8. Elisa Viihde downloads « Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog says:

    [...] Elisa Viihde downloads I have been using Elisa Viihde service for almost a year and I can say I am pretty happy with it. After upgrading to this service also my Internet connection from Elisa started working without too much problems (earlier it worked badly for long time). [...]

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  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Nokia Siemens Networks to shed 17,000 employees, exit segments outside mobile broadband
    http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/nokia-siemens-networks-shed-17000-employees-exit-segments-outside-mobile-br/2011-11-28

    Nokia Siemens Networks believes that in order to get itself back on a path to profitability it need to take the drastic step of laying off about 17,000 employees by the end of 2013 and shut down units it deems not relevant to its long-term strategy.

    “The discussions concern 1,200 out of 6,900 employees in Finland and 2,900 out of 9,100 in Germany,”

    In November, NSN, which had 74,000 employees worldwide,

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