“Kuulemiin”: Finland said goodbye to landline calls

The closure occurred when Elisa, the last great operator Finnish that maintained a fixed telephone network, stopped providing this service.

The last person to pick up a phone on that network was Jarkko Saarimäki, director of the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom), from the Elisa Telephone Museum in Helsinki.

On the other end of the line, in London, was Elisa CEO Topi Manner.

Both They talked about their memories of landlines. Manner recalled that, when he took a language course in London as a teenager in the 1980s, I could only call home once a week and always at a previously agreed upon time to ensure your family was present.

They also talked about the future of mobile technologies before saying goodbye with an informal “Goodbye”, which in Finnish means “let’s talk later”.

The fixed telephone network of the Nordic country It had been in operation since the 1880s.

The museum’s Instagram account invited users to share, in a post, their memories about the landline with a photo that includes a landline, yellow pages and a cordless phone.

Finland – birthplace of the pioneering mobile phone company Nokia– was abandoning fixed lines since the beginning of this century, as mobile phones became increasingly common.

When it announced in January its decision to withdraw the fixed telephone network – a step that its competitors had already taken previously -, Elisa pointed out that she only had “a few thousand” subscribers left for this service. and? It had been years without marketing new lines.

Estonia and the Netherlands They have already dismantled their public switched landline telephone networks.

Starting this Tuesday, the only fixed line providers in Finland will be local operatorswhich currently serve a few thousand subscribers for local calls, reported public radio and television Yle.