A little more on Bite

The paranoid intro
This is a resume of what may appear --well, you know where. In fact, I think it will, so I am blogging it just for the benefit of the non-Latvian readers. But I have this strange feeling that indirectly dissing NN may bring down more shit. Time to lie low until it is safe to jump to the next lilypad...ribbet..
Apropos nothing, my summer house is around 200 meters, if not more, from this stagnant body of water that was once part of the river Gauja or whatever. Well, it seems they are having a frog Woodstock (like 100 000 creatures in one place, with loud frog music). For me it was like this distant murmuring, but if I lived any closer to the gigantic frog chorus, which apparently goes on all night, I would serious start looking for a box of hand grenades. A couple of loud bangs, lots of seagull food, but then those flying fuckers would start screeching and gathering in the hundreds for the feast. Next step, rifle, next after that, police, lunatic asylum... You saw it coming first.
Hunter Thompson is dead, long live his spirit.

...and now about Bite and other stuff

It looks pretty much like Bite, once it gets sufficient coverage, is going to come in with a fixed-price business data/mobile internet package, plus a number of voice deals for getting the lowest cost to certain numbers, countries and the like. You can see it on the www.bite.lt website, this is no inside word from me. Basically it is a set of building blocks or starting points for putting together an individual, tailor-made package of services for your average SME. As Johan Fagerberg of Berg Insight in Sweden told me, nobody in the business community who buys telecoms services buys them by the official list price. Comparing list prices is not very useful except as a starting point for applying your own policies and best practices to getting a good individual company deal.
One of the best deals around may be Tele2's free GPRS service (missed that it was "still free after all this, ( just one) year). You buy a Zelta zivtiņa card and GPRS all you want, though check the small print that your meter isn't running, though it shouldn't be. Tele2 has had free GPRS since last July and it is still using it as a tool to see what folks do and want from it. The company will probably jump directly to 3G for fast business class mobile internet. But for a small business who wants to really limit costs (i.e. LVL 10 and the fish --zivtiņa in Latvian -- dies) plus all the GPRS you can eat.
While we are on the subject of freebies, or so-called freebies, Triatel is giving away Huawei and other cool but obscure brand-name cdma450 handsets along with 24 month subscriptions. Make that 18 month real subscriptions, because all calls in the network are free until year end. Competitors will call this dumping, but it is basically writing off all your operating costs (running the network on zero revenues) as a one big (medium-sized?) m--f--ker of a marketing expense. It may work. It looks very much like what 3 did in Sweden. If I were to say that a 3 salesperson who started chasing me with a free (or SEK 1 or whatever it was) phone last summer in Stockholm's Gallerian shopping center and didn't stop until I was checking in for my flight back to Riga, it wouldn't be too far off the mark.
I hope to be able to test the Triatel 2.4 Mbps wireless internet modem at my summer house and if I was really heading for some kind of sanity boundary, I'd get a Huawei phone, attach a webcam and broadcast the frog festival as a webcast. Why not -- all kinds of sex on the internet, why not thousands of amphibians doing it and being cheered on by the rest.
Oh yes, Triatel may finally admit that, yes, Huawei is building out its network.