Finland switches off last analogue landline calls, ending 140-year copper era
Elisa, the country’s last major operator running a nationwide copper-wire network, marked the transition with a live call between its chief executive and the head of Finland’s transport and communications regulator. A few thousand connections remain in service through smaller local operators.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 8.7.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
Finland’s national copper-wire telephone network carried its final commercial call on Tuesday, bringing to a close a technology that has connected the country since the 1880s.
Elisa chief executive Topi Manner placed the call from London to the Helsinki Telephone Museum, where it was answered by Jarkko Saarimäki, director general of Traficom, Finland’s transport and communications agency.
Yle broadcast the exchange live. “This is quite a historic call,” Manner said, according to Yle.
A long decline
Landline use in Finland peaked in the 1990s, when the country had 2.85 million fixed-line connections. By the end of 2025, that figure had fallen to 47,000, roughly a third of them household lines, Yle reported, citing its own data. The decline accelerated in the early 2000s as mobile phones became widespread.
Elisa is the last of Finland’s three major telecom operators to retire a nationwide copper network. Telia shut down its landline infrastructure in 2019, and DNA closed its final exchange, in the southern city of Lahti, in January. Elisa said in January that only a “few thousand” landline-only plans remained active, with no new ones sold in years, according to Euronews.
Traficom’s leading specialist, Martin Andersson, told Yle that Finland is ahead of much of Europe in retiring copper networks, noting that countries such as Germany still rely heavily on fixed-line infrastructure.
Elisa is expected to spend several years dismantling thousands of kilometres of copper cable, a process the company says is driven by cost savings and by the lower environmental footprint of newer network technologies.
Part of a wider shift
Finland joins Estonia, the Netherlands, Norway and Spain in retiring analogue copper landlines in favour of fibre optic networks, Euronews reported.
Copper cables carry calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes the technology analogue; fibre optic cables transmit data as pulses of light, allowing for faster and more reliable connections.
Finland’s first telephone line was installed in Helsinki in 1877, and Turku became the first Finnish city with a telephone exchange in 1881. By the 1960s, the country ranked seventh in Europe for telephone subscriptions per capita.
Households wanting a landline-style device can still connect one to a fibre network using a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) adapter, which allows calls to be routed over broadband rather than copper wire.
For the few thousand customers still using local copper networks, however, the timeline for full retirement remains open, and at least one operator has warned that storm-damaged lines may not always be restored — a reminder that the shutdown of Finland’s largest network does not yet mean the end of the technology itself.
