1. Mobile services

Finland was the only country with over 1,7 mobile subscriptions per capita. In the other countries the number varied between 1,2 and 1,6 subscriptions per capita in 2017. While there are differences between the countries, it can be said that the total number of mobile subscriptions generally is stagnating.

The number of mobile call minutes was still growing in Sweden and Estonia while stagnating in the other countries. The highest usage per capita was observed in Latvia.

SMS messaging was more common in Lithuania than in the other countries. The number of SMS messages sent per capita in a month in Lithuania was 133, whereas the number in the other countries varied between 33 and 88. The number of SMS messages sent was increasing in Estonia, while it was steadily decreasing in the other countries.

Data traffic in mobile networks continued to increase in all of the countries. Finland had by far the largest data volumes, 24 Gbyte per capita and month, and traffic continued to grow fast. An important factor behind this development is the popularity of subscriptions without data caps in Finland. Volumes in the other countries ranged from 4 to 9 Gbyte per capita and month.

The number of machine-to-machine (M2M) SIM cards was growing in all of the countries. Sweden had far more M2M SIMs than any other country: over 1 per capita. This is a result of Telenor using Sweden has a hub for its international M2M business, which also means that an unknown number of these SIM cards are actually used by customers abroad rather than in Sweden.