Sunday, June 23, 2019

Finland: A country with only Unlimited Data Plans


I was listening to Elisa couple of weeks back, at 5G World Summit. One of the things that surprised me was that Elisa offered unlimited data plans but the price varied based on the maximum speeds possible. The same approach was going to continue with 5G. When 5G data speeds would improve, new packages will be added with the improved speeds.


Tefficient has pointed out multiple times that even though all operators in Finland offer unlimited data plans, their ARPU has increased in 2018. This is in contrast to the other mature markets, even though they may not be offering unlimited data plans.


Same thing was pointed out by Rewheel research that highlighted in their May 2019 report that, "Finnish operators that executed ‘unlimited everything’ strategies were the undisputed champions of the 4G era"

A mashable article pointed out that "5G will be crazy fast, but it'll be worthless without unlimited data". This is very true.


Mobile operators should start thinking about how they can offer unlimited data plans, especially if they keep touting applications that are going to use loads of data. As you can see from the tweet above, a 1 hour 8K video streaming would roughly use between 7 - 10 GB of data.

Let me know your thoughts.

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