Elisa ready to capitalise on 5G assets

Elisa CTO Kalle Lehtinen expressed confidence its dense mobile network, abundance of spectrum and solid consumer business case for 5G put it in a strong position to see positive top-line growth.

The Finland-based mobile operator, which launched 5G service in April, has 1,400 cell sites per million people and nearly 400MHz of spectrum in the 3.5GHz band, which Lehtinen said gives it the highest 5G frequency per capita in Europe.

Elisa offers three speed-based pricing tiers, ranging from €32 a month for 300Mb/s to €50 per month for 1Gb/s.

“We see growing demand for fast, reliable and high-quality connectivity,” he said, noting that as availability of higher-speed service increases, Elisa sees a corresponding rise in usage.

He cited data showing Finns consume the most mobile data in the world, with typical monthly usage at about 16GB in 2018, and 36 per cent of households on mobile-only broadband packages.

Elisa’s mobile data traffic grew 11-times over the last six years, with video accounting for 70 per cent. Monthly data usage reached 25GB per subscriber at end-2018.

The move to intelligent automation of network planning and optimisation resulted in 86 per cent of network faults being solved before customers become aware of them, he said.

Lehtinen claimed Elisa runs the most automated network in the world, with capex driven by customer need-based analytics.

(source: Mobile World Live – 16 Oct 2019)