Finland, 4G and Nonsense

Here I sit in Sulkava, A small town in the East of FInland, uploading over 1gb’s worth of data via the 3G connection on my old iphone. A task which is quite unsuccessful in Espoo, the second largest city in Finland. Today, in Sulkava we have great weather, the sky is open, bright blue and lake Saimaa reflects the above in the same way a mirror would.

This feat has inspired many a thought.

Sometimes I get morosely perplexed at just how a country which has so much rationality and logistics with it’s choices when it comes to Education, Healthcare and dare I say Politics, but then can have such an odd stance when it comes to Technology, especially Telecommunications.

I won’t talk about the state of Nokia and how the noxious influence of abject greed has destroyed what was once a cornerstone in innovation and national power. What I really want to get off my chest is just how frustrating telecommunications companies are here in Finland.

I have lived in Helsinki for 6 years and can safely say that my experiences with broadband and wireless internet services have been utterly abysmal. We have tried all of the three major providers and had equally crappy results.

True, the UK is no better but I expect more from Finland, Finland cares more for it’s workers, it’s people and their well being. Finland has intelligence (currently).

The vast percentage of the countries internet supply is supported by the good old fashioned copper phone cables that delivery us our DSL connection.

Having lived in a prime location on the largest and busiest street in Helsinki, I can say that net performance in comparisons to the extortionate charges was nothing short of frustrating.

A ‘high speed’ internet connection offered by just one of the three telecommunications ‘giants’, cost 40€ per month for what was promoted as a 24mbs download speed and 5mbps upload speed but in truth was actually a 7mbps on the down and 0.9 on the up and after several drawn out submissions of complaint which resulted in no compensation due to the connection quality being ‘perfectly inline with company policy’ and would never be considered as poor service.

However the explanation that the distance and the quality of the copper DSL cables where to blame for such a large performance fall off.

I thought that was bad but now having moved only 17 odd kilometers away from the city center the only available broadband offers a 1mbps down and 0.3 upload speed (also due to poor quality copper lines), things have taken a very different perspective business wise.

My uploads for clients which consists of full resolution digital images (on average) is 20gb per month when not so busy and 60gb to 100gbs when very busy.

This may not sound like much but for a one man show like me, it’s enough, especially with such a slow upload speed. On average it takes 5 hours to upload 7gb and the bandwidth is so poor that our internet is unusable for any other task during the transfer.

I ask myself why is it this crap?

Well, it seems we are stuck in a moronic limbo while companies are struggling to decipher an intelligent decision of which direction to go.

Telecommunications companies in Finland are borderline idiotic, being far more interested profiteering from the ferocious peddling of digital television packages rather than providing fast and reliable internet connections to homes across the nation.

Currently they place all their eggs firmly into just one basket and the choice of investment is the infamous 4G network. A wireless method of net delivery that boasts blistering fast transfers, faster than the likes of fibre optic delivery!

Hmmm… fibre optics over a wireless network, I’m already dubious.

Recently, I received a sales call from an opposing telecommunications company, peddling a 4G USB thumb drive modem, not something that I was insanely interested in as the area in which I live is classified as a non functional 4G area which incidentally represents a good 85% of the entire country. However, the sales rep protested that the quality of connection would be at least twice the speed of our current broadband.

I agreed to sample the said modem if it was crystal clear that I the subscription be cancelled if it was anything less than double our broadband speed and also if it was anywhere near inconsistent.

An agreement was drafted and I received the modem in the post several days later.

I tested it on the evening and it unfortunately offers only double the upload speed, admittedly tempting in a loose respect but certainly not enough to justify an extra 25€ per month for a minimum of 2 years contract. However, the connection would not last for longer than 20 minutes before failing and then requiring several attempts to reconnect. The software that accompanied the device I can only describe as painful, clearly no resource had been invested in that area either so far.

Once again I sampled the 4G modem in the morning and the transfer speed was comical, some 0.70kbps and a disconnection occurring every 4 minutes.

Conclusion - utterly useless (currently)…

Why? Well, this is considered new tech and telecommunications companies are trying to form the cash to support 4G, they do not have the resources to operate it at a useable level to consumers at this time at all.

My frustrations are that even when they do, we can’t ignore (but they can and will) atmospherical conditions and local terrain will have a huge effect on the reliability, consistency and the performance of 4G.

I can only imagine the expenditure and resource consumption being immense with this size project and that it will take at least a few years before the providers are even close to being satisfied. Considering my past experiences with the level of service the consumer receives and the level that the provider is satisfied with, we as consumers are going to be paying high for poor quality. Again.

Now, I sit here having finished my 1gb upload and had the extra bandwidth to write this and surf a little too, all on a stable 3G connection. Impressive yes but this is due to good weather conditions and the large reflective expanse of water.

Finland has an extremely short summer and a very long winter coupled with the reputation for having very unpredictable weather however, so why are these companies investing so much into a method of internet delivery that largely depends clear weather conditions and  can be annihilated by the presence of trees?

Fibre optics are surely a much more intelligent method? Why is this being ignored? Is it because Swedish folk got there first?

In Sweden fibre optics have been already developed, promoted, and delivered to a large percentage of the population for years now. In Finland, fibre optics have been shunned and as a result the percentage of fibre optic services are in minuscule minority and by no means available even to those willing to pay whatever the price may be.

It just makes no sense, there is a huge revenue being lost and the available tech stays stuck in this under developed, under maintained and unsupported limbo.

Way to go.

The Yellow Brick Road - Finnish Real Estate