Thursday, January 19, 2006

Not news, not yet...

I discovered Wednesday (January 18) that my paper had not published the story that Lattelekom was going to offer 10 Mbps DSL internet at some point in the first half of 2006.
The story needed a slight re-write, placing less emphasis on "the Great Satan" Lattelekom, although, like them or not, the dominant actors do set the national benchmark. So to my mind, if Lattelekom does it, for better or worse, it is/will be done. Baltkom, at best, has around 9000 fixed internet connections, best top speed 2 Mbps, only in certain parts of Riga. IZZI probably has somewhat fewer connections, again in restricted parts of Riga. Lattelekom has around 57 000 household DSL subscribers, which is a bit more and they are in different parts of the country, though presumably, mainly in Riga.
I did find that a company called Balticoms, which operates in the Riga suburbs, does offer pretty genuine looking 10 Mbps international traffic internet for around LVL 16.50 per month (it says it has its own 300 Mbps international channel, not bad).
Anyway, the story didn't run, it was here only on the blog, but no one in the Latvian media picked it up!
Ever since a certain journalist left the news agency LETA and another one from BNS joined a certain paper, nobody watches the blog and now they have missed a perfect episode of what could have been unintended blowback (when you let others beat you with your own story :) as carried by some other media ). I was sure my story would run, so I blogged what was pretty much an exclusive on Lattelekom and when it didn't make the paper, I was sure someone would pick it up...
Oh yes, and nobody in the Latvian blogosphere noticed either, not even Kristaps Kaupe, whose company I actually called for comment (they are a small IT outfit providing internet at 512 Kbps international traffic, much faster domestic in an area covered by one big spool of Ethernet cable around their office in downtown Riga)
Well, I now feel safer about publishing whatever I know and whatever comes to mind here, no risk of compromising exclusivity for my paper ...:)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of course that was good news, but still Lattelekom is "satan". Their famous 1188 TV ad seems to be pure plagiats. http://laacz.lv/f/movies/gouttesdeau.mov

Anonymous said...

Yap, sad that good news are the worst news :)

One other thought on "satan" - it seems that everyone will have the party if SATAN will be selled to "whoever in whole f-world". All those regulators (somekind like our road policemans) are doing fine to kill the national company by declaring them as monopolist.

But if You would look at voice market (fixed+non-fixed) the vision seems a little bit different.

Same freakin' situation is for LMT if they are pushed to compete with international providers (Tele2, Bite [Vodafone?]). Those "great, smart" butts are privileged as they could by cell phones at lower prices for whole chain than LMT.
I wont even speak about SATAN - I dont think they are stupid enough by not offering subsidized fixed phones. I suspect that great REGUL* just fobiden them to make offers like this

krabis, back in town

* Raze-Every-Goodlooking-Underdogs- Latvians

Anonymous said...

It’s nice that some good people are reading this blog too (Jurgis) :) better concentrate to most important events - holydays, snowboard, etch.