Saturday, August 05, 2006

The Bite Honcho speaks

Bite presented its half-year figures, which were on the mark (LVL 1.9 millon EBITDA loss), 108000 users, 87 % of the population and 50% of the territory of Latvia covered. Not bad for nine months work and some LVL 15 million invested.

Here is what Bite honcho Maarten van Engeland had to say:


And now for what I think will happen. As I have mentioned earlier, I think that Bite will enter the household broadband market with a fixed wireless HSDPA offering. To get 3.6 Mbps for about the same price as Triatel (1 Mbps) and to jump to as high as 14.4 Mbps (more likely around 8 Mbps) is not a bad deal at all. If Bite can keep reasonable quality on this service and pump, say, full-screen TV (22 channels to ordinary TV sets), it will be one hell of a disruptive offering for everyone.
Like Triatel, a home HSDPA gadget is out of the box, no waiting. Speeds will match wireline. Bite's best TV shows may match that which people actually watch out of Baltcom's 100+ channels and on IZZI's digital cable. HSDPA TV may be a bit pricey, but we shall see. Finally, I hope Bite doesn't fiddle with the bitstream and allows Skype to run over the HSDPA connection. On the other hand, doing that sort of hands customers the shovel with which to dig the pay-per-minute operators' grave.

MISTAKE!!
The www.latvia.lv website did not cost LVL 808 000. Fuck no! Caught that error BEFORE it got into the paper, but blogged it :(. Don't believe everything you read. It cost more like 80 000 something. So just one Hummer(?). Sorry Ina.

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