Lattelecom looking to LTE for its mobile side?

Lattelecom, the Latvian fixed network operator owned 49 % by Sweden's TeliaSonera, may be looking in the medium term to build out a 4G or LTE (Long-Term Evolution) mobile internet network (with voice capability).
With the future of telecoms privatization in Latvia stalled and highly politicized, there is a good chance that in the next three to five years, Lattelecom could end up sold or owned seperately from its distant sister company, mobile operator LMT. Both companies have done little or no cross-selling or integration of their products.
Without some kind of mobile business, any modern telco operator that doesn't want to be a mere ISP (and even an ISP with national coverage) is hobbled. In the medium term, LTE, which hasn't even been allocated frequencies in Latvia, is a viable option. Latvia's mobile operators -- Bite and Tele2 -- have indicated they will go for LTE and its up to 100 Mbps internet speed at some point. Tele2 in Sweden is launching LTE next year together with Telenor, as is LMT's parent TeliaSonera.
Lattelecom is already cooperating with wireless/mobile internet provider Triatel (the mobile internet offering is still in the works) which runs an EV DO network countrywide and offers an unspectacular download speed of 3.6 Mbps (compared to 3.6 Mbps on the GSM/UMTS operators HSDPA networks, with 14.4 Mbps promised soon by Bite).
The Latvian government has yet to allocate frequencies for LTE, but this will happen in 2010. As far as Lattelecom and LMT goes, it still remains for the Latvian government to (as I wrote to the great amusement of a high executive in the Nordic telecoms industry) to unfuck itself on the issue of privatization (i.e. a sale to TeliaSonera of at least all of LMT). With 2010 an election year, this is unlikely, but in 2011, with yet another round of drastic budget cuts upcoming, Latvia may be ready for anyone tossing coins into its begging bowl.

Reflections on IOD 2009 and the Babylonian Sheep

IBM's conference Information on Demand 2009 (IOD 2009) took the IOD story a step further with considerable attention paid to predictive analytics. No surprise, as IBM just completed the acquisition of SPSS, a Chicago-based predictive analytics company.

Indeed, the IOD sequence has gone from gathering and grooming data (a single, hopefully truthful view of the company/customer base), making it all accessible (de-siloing), finding hidden gems (data mining and analysis) to using the data to look into future trends and developments (predictive analytics or wild guessing with lots of numbers/??/).

Common to all of this is that we have a large global base of electronic data that various smart spiders can zip through and give us the answers we need. But that sort of presumes that this vast electronic data base, growing by exobytes every year, will still be fully searchable and subject to analysis in 50 or 100 years.

Which brings up the Babylonian Sheep Question that I put to a few IBM folks, including Ambuj Goyal, but got no really satisfactory answer. Which is fine, because there probably is none. It is not so much a question as a kind of meta-framework setter.

So what is the Babylonian Sheep Question?

Simply, that if I want to get a rough idea of what the market was like for sheep in Babylon 4000 years ago, much of the data warehouse (clay tablets) are still there. One can drill down to the single transaction record level -- Uruk sold 20 sheep to Gilgamesh for 50 bushels of wheat, or whatever. Since the data warehouse (scattered among various museums) has survived 4000 or more years, I can safely assume it will be around in 200 or 300 years, never mind 50 years down the road (assuming no nuclear holocausts or the like, although that would only bake the clay more...).

Now, as for all those exobytes -- I really don't know what will be accessible in 2030. I certainly can't access some of the floppy disks I still have with stuff I wrote in the 1980s. With the global datasphere growing at petabytes per week (month?) it is clear that we will have to have new data compression and storage technologies. Otherwise we will be replacing the world's forests with forests of blade servers. I can imagine that 10 years from now, most data will be stored holographically in the cloud or in some other extreme volume storage technology. That is a long way from the floppy disk.

Ambuy Goyal, by the way, talked about data decommissioning, which addressed the issue of keeping relevant data around and instantly accessible, while putting historically interesting, but operationally irrevelant data stored elsewhere. Fair enough. But no answer to the Babylonian Sheep question. Because irrelevant as Uruk's sale of 20 sheep is 4000 years later, it is still there and available in printed translation from the cuneiform inscriptions. What will happen to my first American Express purchase records (from 1977 on some mainframe), which may be of some relevance when I am a 80 year old geezer some 20 years from now is another question. It may be solved, probably will be solved. But I am not all that confident that our entire electronic record of the world and daily life will be as durable as those fragmentary records of the Babylonian sheep market that we can still examine and analyze today.

IBM IOD 2009 second day highlights (videoblog)

Here is my video of what I thought were highlights of the second day of IBM's Information on Demand conference (IOD 2009) in Las Vegas. I also shot a lot of footage of Malcom Gladwell's address on the third day, but I may not be able to post that until I am back in Latvia.

A look at SPSS, IBM's new predictive analytics acquisition

I had a chance, while at IBM's IOD 2009, to talk to Jason Verlen, the chief product strategist at SPSS, a predictive analytics company recently acquired by IBM. Here is a video, unfortunately filmed near a source of green light which I did not notice. Did my best to make Jason look less Martian with iMovie :).

Anyone sending an AYPFC? message to Tele2 Latvia?

An AYPFC message is one that starts with " Are you people fucking crazy??" Maybe it should be sent to Tele2, Latvia's biggest mobile operator (it claims) in terms of customer numbers. It was Tele2 that organized the "meteorite falls in Latvia" stunt that got the country its 15 minutes (or more) of underserved international fame. As if a meteor strike on top of a devastating economic crisis was something positive. It was certainly not something that Latvia "caused" by its own activity.

The publicity stunt, which caused underpaid Latvian firemen, police and soldiers to rush to a huge smoking crater outside Mazsalaca, a kind of Latvian Podunk, certainly had no message about mobile telecoms services. It had the unintended and black humor effect of causing some totally batshit* local lady (reputedly a local town councilor, where they don't check if you are batshit or not) to stand in a road selling tickets for 1 LVL apiece to curiousity seekers.

I am beginning to wonder whether Tele2's marketing director Jānis Spoģis has gone off the deep end. Maybe not, because the previous goon-show style Tele2 commercial, with adults skateboarding off rooftops into swimming pools and doing burnouts on a kitchen floor with a motorscooter reputedly came from Sweden, where the Tele2 group is headquartered. So the Vikings are back to eating those mushrooms again...

By contrast, the local Latvian commercials for the Zelta Zivtiņa (Golden Fish) prepaid cards have been charming even when bizarre, such as when the cow Gauja moves into the "Friends" - style apartment with the usual characters. Or when one of the characters sews a huge crocodile for "nothing" -- the price of calls to a circle of friends on the Tele2 network.

Apparently this is not the end of the Viking mescalero (people who chew hallucinogenic cacti) campaign. We will probably see fake sea (lake) monsters rising from a Latvian lake or perhaps UFO-style balloons floating high in the sky (we'll see if Tele2 will be as ready to pay for scrambling NATO F-16s as it was to compensate the fire department). Well, the balloon thing was already done by a family of wackos in America.

I am in Las Vegas as I write, the capital of "unreal" in the US, though at a a very real IBM Information on Demand (IOD2009) conference and the whole meteorite incident seems even beyond building a second Eiffel Tower (where you can get married) which the Vegas folks have done.

* from the urban dictionary :)

batshit insane
	When someone has crossed into extreme insanity.

Highlights of day one at IBM's IOD2009

I am in Las Vegas on assignment from my day job at IBM's Information on Demand (IOD2009) and recorded some highlights of the opening day's presentations by Ambuj Goyal and Frank Kern.

No one first to name a price in Latvian telecoms deal?

NOTE: I got tweeted by an executive at Lattelecom, see below.

The Latvian government seems to have re-opened the seemingly dormant issue of selling its holdings in fixed network operator Lattelecom and mobile operator Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT). During an October 16 television talk show, where this blogger was one of the journalist participants, Minister of Economics Artis Kampars said the government was ready to consider selling its telecom assets, but added that the most eager (and probably only) potential buyer, Sweden's TeliaSonera, had not named a price in talks with the Latvians in early September. By Kampars' account, that meeting was one where the sides got nowhere by saying: "What do you want for the companies?" "No, you tell us what you are ready to pay." "No, you please tell us what you want..." and so on.

Kampars also repeated what he had said publically a few days earlier, that state assets, including Lattelecom and LMT, would not be sold "on the cheap." TeliaSonera recently completed acquisition of all remaining shares in Eesti Telecom (which, unlike Lattelecom and LMT, is a traded company and already had a majority holding by the Swedes). Telia Sonera was less successfully with Lithuania's TEO, failing to get the necessary percentage of shares to delist the company and force the sale of any remaining minority shares.

I haven't been in touch with my Swedish sources about the latest chapter of the neverending story of trying to buy Lattelecom and LMT, but will try to do so before I leave for the States on Wednesday to attend an IBM conference in Las Vegas (October 25 -28).

Latvia is in dire need of any revenues to patch its budget deficit and, considering that telecoms have not suffered too badly in the crisis and against a background of rising stock markets in Europe and the US, the two unlisted companies could probably be sold for a decent price. Of course, Kampars and the Latvian government will never see another LVL 500 million bid by the Swedes, as was made a couple of years back in one of the "fat years" of real-estate bubble and lending frenzy. Interestingly, the sum is exactly as much as international lenders want Latvia to cut from its spending in 2010 and 2011 (for a total of LVL 1 billion). But that chance was blown. Maybe they could try for, say, LVL 400 million and settle for LVL 375 million -- these are just my wild guesses. Even without the deep recession, which I think will last at least until 2014 in Latvia, the value of any fixed-line network will decline as everything goes mobile and 4G networks appear. So the best bid has already been lost -- maybe it is time to seize the opportunity.

From Twitter: A Lattelecom executive tweeted me that he believes the company will gain in value because of broadband, IP TV and content distribution (IP TV, video on demand and the like). Welcome to the new web order :).

Bite honcho talks about mobile broadband, free call business model

Fred Hrenchuk, the CEO and board chairman of mobile operator Bite Group, talks about mobile broadband (a forthcoming jump to 14.4 Mbps), the effects of the economic downturn and the BiFri free calling business model.