Surprisingly, the Nordic countries are very clearly in the lead in the development of mobile telephones. Several explanations are possible - economic, technical, geographic or political - but none pinpoints what is unique about the Nordic countries. A combination of state legitimacy derived from the welfare state, service-oriented monopolies and some accidental historical reasons are proposed as an additional explanation. The story of mobile telephones in Finland is presented, together with a profile of users, based on an open question survey. This shows that the popularity of mobile telephones is based on two quite different reasons: perfect reachability (which implies that a call can be made from anywhere, and the receiver is always there, immobile from the point of view of the caller) and a perceived (although quite fallacious) immediate intimacy.
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