Lithuania - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Statistics and Analyses

Lithuania - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Statistics and Analyses

Lithuania’s telcos ramping up new technologies

Lithuania’s telecom market benefits from the near comprehensive reach of LTE services and from extensive fibre networks. Indeed, the country has one of the highest fibre broadband penetration rates in Europe.

The main telco Telia has steadily scaled up its FttP offerings over the years, reaching 300Mb/s in 2014 and then progressing to 600Mb/s as early as in 2015 being one of the fastest rates in the region at the time). A 1Gb/s services is now widely available, while a 2Gb/s service was launched in early 2022. The company’s fibre broadband reaches some 900,000 premises across the country. Tele2 has also invested in fibre, launching an FttP service in Vilnius in mid-2022.

These companies made a strategic decision more than a decade ago not to upgrade DSL technology but to develop a fibre access networks instead. They expanded from greenfield sites (the initial focus of fibre investment) to the largest cities, and so progressively to smaller towns. These efforts have been assisted by certain provisions of the Law on Corporate Profit Tax, which provide tax relief for investments in new technologies.

At the same time, the telcos are investing in 5G networks.

The government in May 2020 approved a draft plan to develop 5G, aiming for services to be launched in at least one of the country’s largest cities (Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Siauliai, or Panevezys) by the end of 2022, and to all five cities by the end of 2023. By 2025, 5G should cover all urban areas and main transport routes and hubs, such as motorways, rail routes, and airports.

To facilitate this, the regulator in March 2022 permitted licensees holding spectrum in the 2.1GHz and 2.5GHz bands to repurpose their holdings for 5G, and in the following May it started an auction process for spectrum in the 700MHz and 3.4GHz bands for 5G use.