There is no single answer. But there are some telling data points.
"Firstly, the Finnish infatuation with the telephone is no new phenomenon, no mere byproduct of Nokia's dramatic rise to prominence. Finns have been crazy about phones from practically the first moment they could get their hands on them.
In 1896, Mrs. Alex-Tweedie, an English travel writer, noted that 'Finland is full of phones.' Angel Ganivet, the Spanish consul in Finland in 1896-97, observed that phones were almost as common as kitchenware, and devoted an entire chapter of his book on Finland to the 'excessive' interest Finns had in technology.
It also has become an inordinately popular national obsession (at least among the telecom-literate people I interviewed) to mention at least once a day how there were more than 800 separate telephone companies in the country during the 1920s and '30s.
Finland is a sparsely settled country -- a little over 5 million people are sprinkled across a land mass 1,000 kilometers long from north to south. An attraction to phones is therefore an understandable outgrowth of local geography.
But a historical misstep by the Russian tsar also played a crucial role. During the 19th century Finland was an 'autonomous Grand Duchy' under the rule of the Russian Empire. (Prior to that, for seven centuries Finland had been ruled by its neighbor, Sweden.)
Finland's multitude of phone companies was a legacy of the Tsar's decision to declare the telegraph a militarily essential device -- and the telephone, on the other hand, little more than a toy.
Wary of the possibility that the Tsar might change his mind, the Finnish government chose to grant licenses to operate telephone companies to all applicants -- in marked contrast to the practice of most other nations, who ensured that telephone operation was a tightly controlled state monopoly.
The reasoning of the Finnish government was as follows: It would be much easier for the tsar to renege on his decision if all he had to do was simply close down or otherwise take control of one state enterprise, rather than hunt down hundreds of independent companies.
When you have 800 telephone companies in a country that, in the 1920s, only had a population of 2 million to 3 million people, you are forced to become expert in interconnection technologies.
As a result, Finns understand networking.
