The former military airbase at iauliai has gone through a major modernisation implemented by Philips of the Netherlands. This is perhaps the fastest growing sector of the Lithuanian economy. It has been attracting an increasing amount of public and private investment, which has translated into new technology and overall modernization. Major changes in the ownership and management structures of telecommunications companies have occurred recently. The public company Lithuanian Telecom has almost 1.100,000 fixed telephone subscriber lines.
Subscribers are now able to take advantage of the new opportunities that modern technology offers.
The mobile communications market has grown more than 11-fold in just two years. At the beginning of 1996 there were only 15,000 mobile phone users in the country. By July 2000 this figure had grown to almost 320,000. Operating licenses have been granted to six mobile communications, four paging, eight data transmission and satellite com- munications and 50 regional cable television operators. The postal service, celebrating its 80 th anniversary in 1998, has established the EMS, an express mail and package delivery service.