Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Video of Bite's new mobile internet offer

Maarten van Engeland of Bite Group describes the new Vodaphone Mobile Connect and Bite Hotspot services the company is introducing in Latvia.
I know that Latvian blogger Arturs Mednis doesn't think he benefits from video rather than text, but I think this is short, simple and turned out well.
Kristaps Kaupe of blogiem.lv will probably see nothing again, unless he has updated his Flash gadgets. He has seen too much already :) :) and I am waiting for the blowback* of his Latvian-language post about my post about Lattelecom and IP TV for ordinary TV sets. The will be looking for the blabbermouth at the Great Satan**.
So I have pre-empted two critical comments :).

Murky hints :)

Things are going to happen in the Latvian WiMax space in the next few months. Big names are involved, things may be being tested soon. Mid or late 2007 could be when it is rolled out and when it may be the disruptive alternative to GSM/UMTS that some analysts have said it could be.
Certainly, Skype on mobile internet has some people concerned. Mobile operators are thinking of offering flat rate minutes to corporate customers as a counterweight (say, 600 minutes per user to Sweden or whatever for a sum comparable to SkypeOut and with some quality guarantees, as well as guarantees that business calls are actually made to Sweden and not to Cousin Borat in Kazakhstan, which can happen with SkypeOut since it practically has one rate to the world). The disruption is starting even before Niklas Z and his Estonian whiz kids finally work out how to do Skype on Symbian. Were it summer (nay, winter is 'a comin' in, loudly sing goddamn -- Ezra Pound or some dude parodying some medieval tune about summer, what you sing with lutes and shit...) I would then go out and finally figure out how the f**k to connect my Nokia N80 to one of Lattelecom's WiFi phone booths (I have a small collection of their scratch cards). I would then use the as yet unborn Skype for Symbian to gnaw at the revenue leg of Lattelecom's cousin Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT).
And that was the bizarrely worded post of the month. 'Tis Halloween after all...
* blowback describes news published in a foreign language coming back into the domestic, local language news market.
** the Great Satan is a name I borrowed from the rhetoric of eminent and dead Iranian clerics to describe a certain telecommunications company as viewed, in the late 90s and early 00s, by many Latvians. I even wrote an article for Northern Enterprise magazine (dead, too, I believe) with the title Surfing With The Great Satan about, among other things, how that company started offering DSL internet.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

However, while you are waiting for Skype I would suggest you to try SillyAnt's mobile client for N80 (www.sillyant.com) - it will give an insight how such systems will work...The drawback there is no smooth system to deliver seamless handover between GSM/UMTS and WiFi...On the other hand mobile operators have their own aces in sleeves - e.g. UMA, IMS with SIP (it implements VoIP in operator's premises).

Anonymous said...

flash9 beta for linux is now available:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

watching the video works without problems,
thanks,
markus

Anonymous said...

Who are the bigwigs behind WiMax trials in Latvia? Is it LVRTC, Lattelecom, Tele2 or Unistars? Or am I missing someone here?

Juris Kaža said...

Solnyshok,
You may be guessing in the right direction;

Anonymous said...

Juris,

according to this article
http://www.norby.ee/?structure=008&content=353&articleid=55&rnd=3813
I might have been looking in wrong direction.

However, I do not find Norby amongst spectrum licensees on this page

http://www.esd.lv/inner.php?left=106&left2=134&content=140&html=wa_op.htm

Do you know if they are going to work in unlicensed spectrum or they are renting it from local companies?

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