Thursday, February 23, 2006

Lattelekom to flip the bird?

Here's the latest from my murky unnameable sources:
Lattelekom is going to crank up the speed of its undersea optical cable to Sweden to several gigabits. One reason is that it is on the verge of doing a major deal with a (Scandinavian?) television organization that will use the fiber to distribute its digital TV content wholesale by landlines rather than satellite (the bird). It will probably be a regional deal involving all three Baltic countries. Lattelekom and its regional partners will provide the MPLS backbone to deliver a high quality IP TV signal to cable operators. Tests show that the result is better than digital satellite (depends on a shared or individual dish antenna), which is the way a lot of cable operators get their signal (in Latvia, from Latvian TV's dishes on Bunny Island - Zaķu sala).
MPLS allows a better quality of service implementation and the ability to shape the way the backbone handles the packet stream.

And from not so murky sources:

Look for Triatel trying to pre-empt HDSPA services on Latvia's UMTS networks (0nly Bite Latvija has said it will implement) by boosting its nomadic wireless internet speeds to over 3 Mbps by upgrading to EV DO rev. A. The current version of EV DO manages up to 2.4 Mbps, but Triatel talks of a 1 Mpbs link just to be safe. However, the cdma-450 operator may be racing against a three-legged horse -- there are very few HDSPA phones and radio cards available.
Also look to Triatel implementing "plastic roaming" starting with some Russian GSM operators and then Western Europe. This means that sticking one's Triatel SIM card in a GSM phone will work with these roaming partners. Next step -- hybrid phones that work on the European GSM frequencies. Then the two phone problem will be solved. Huawei, which came out of the closet about its relationship with Triatel recently, says it will have hybrids, too. Huawei is building Triatel's network in Latvia. Official at last!
In 2008, look for mind-boggling wireless internet speeds of over 70 Mpbs downlink with EV DO rev B coming online. Don't know what Triatel's plans are, the technology was described in a presentation by one of Huawei's demi-honchos, Jeff Wang. Sun Gang, a gentleman I have spoken to a few times (he spilled the beans about Latvia) was also there at the joint dog and pony show in Riga. But no Chinese snacks, just typical (but good) Latvian presentation stuff :(.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If the first part is true then I suppose Apollo IPTV will ride big white horse (izjāj baltā zirgā).

second part - who cares about triatel and their triple horse :)

krabis