Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Mikrotik to make fixed HSDPA devices

My sources tell me that the Latvian wireless internet equipment and systems designer Mikrotik (the stuff is made mostly by Hanzas elektronika in colorfully named Ogre) will start making its own HSDPA home/office device in the medium term. Earlier, it was rumored that Bite, the mobile operator, had talked to Mikrotik (known as Mikrotikls in Latvian) about making a router for it. Now it looks like the product will be operator independent and moderately priced. In other words, you get a gadget to mount on the sweet spot (for HSDPA) coverage in your home and office, nail the thing to the wall, then set up a WiFi hotspot for the home or office computers and other devices. By the time this hits the market, we may be seeing HSDPA speeds above the current 3.6 Mbps, so this may also be the a kind of home entertainment reciever for digital IP TV, streaming media and all that stuff. Look for this thing on the market next spring. It will be another addition to the almost instant, out of the box broadband that the UMTS/GSM mobile operators and Triatel (EV DO) can provide. No wonder Lattelecom is giving away free phone calls to switch as many of its 600 000 subscribers to DSL (up to 5 Mbps) as it can.
I hope to write some musings on Lattelecom and the serial deaths of traditional telecoms business models at some later time. Now it is late and I am burned out ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm, interesting...
I just called Mikrotikls and they don't know anything about it! =)
How it can be?

Anonymous said...

if you 'call' you usually don't reach the R&D dept :D