IT'S the speed that I like," says Arto Savolainen, a 62-year-old pensioner and enthusiastic Web user. Although two generations older than the student types most often associated with hours of browsing, a wired pensioner is less of a surprise in Finland.
With a population of five million - about the same as the island of Ireland - Finland is the world's most wired country, where people surf the Net more often than they go to the movies
Finns hate small talk, seem shy and isolated to many and speak a language that, apart from themselves, only Estonians can understand: experts say these characteristics are exactly what it takes to send a nation online.
"It's a Net mentality," says Johan Helsingius, managing director of Internet access provider EUNet's Finnish subsidiary. There are twice as many Internet host computers per head here than in the US (see http://www. telmo.fi/telmo4 and almost 10 per cent of the population use the Net weekly.
Finns use the Net primarily for email, to find information and read news: entertainment, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is the least-used service, according to a recent survey (Finnish-speakers see http://www.pjoy.fi/ tutkimus/kt97).
"For Finns, it's the words that count in conversation," and they "want technological gadgets for the sake of technology, Helsingius says. The Net offers the straight-to-the point communication Finns want - even when there is no clear point to the activity.
Take the web site of Pihtiputaan Mummo (meaning Grandma from Pihtipudas, a remote Finnish village; see http://www.eunet.fi/pihtipudas/mummo.html), which features a virtual grandmother Net surfer, her favourite recipes (in Finnish only), her favourite non-alcoholic drinks, and more.
The site works well - you can even spin around into a completely programmed three-dimensional virtual hut (http://www.eunet.fi/pihtipudas/mummo/mokki.html) - but makes no sense.
On the other hand, the govemment and other public service providers eagerly put out valuable information on the Net, and are constantly developing new Web services. Banking could hardly be easier than at Finnish banks' Web sites.
Tourist maps, timetables, events, culture, history summaries and general information are easily available via the government's pages (see http://virtual.finland.fi/), and there is plenty of information for professional visitors too.
For instance, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin can learn all they need to know about Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari's residence in Helsinki where they are to meet next Thursday (http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/mantyniemi.html). And should either of them want to read the "wired" grandma's recipes, they may find the two-way Finnish-English dictionary handy (see http://www.mofile.fi/db.htm).
Besides the culture, Finland's geography - isolated and scarcely populated, with only 15 people per square kilometre - and competition have helped Finland establish the world-leading position irt communications.
The country's first telephone networks were privately owned, but ever since it won independence from Russia in 1917, the private operators have had to compete with the state's operator Telecom Finland.
Finns now top the world in cellular phone usage - three in 10 have mobile phones - and the world's first digital mobile network was opened in Finland, whose industrial flagship is leading mobile phone and systems maker Nokia.
And since Finns speak a language unrelated to most other European tongues, most learn English to be able to communicate with people beyond the Nordic region, so they have relatively few problems with the Anglo-American dominance of the Internet. By contrast, in France, pride in the French language and the national communication box Minitel created in the 1980s have tended to hamper Net usage.
France's President Jacques Chirac reportedly had his first encounter with a computer mouse only last December; Britain's Queen Elizabeth is only now setting up her home page; but Finland's Ahtisaari has been wired since 1994.
For many Finns telecommunications in general and now cyberspace have become a welcome link to the rest of the world. As such the Net has been essential, for instance, to Finnish software developer Linus Thorvalds, who created an operating system called Linux, now used by millions around the world.
"It helped the Linux project very much - it was in fact the Internet that made it all happen as it did," he says. "The nice thing about the Internet is that it doesn't matter where you live."