Lattelecom & wireless broadband, HP in NYC

Once the management/staff buyout (MBO) is complete, one of Lattelecom's priorities will be to expand its broadband coverage. CEO Nils Melngailis has said as much. More than 100,000 of Lattelecom's more than 600 000 wireline customers already have DSL, and the aim is clearly to get almost everyone aboard. That includes customers beyond the reach of the present network in rural towns and outlying areas.
Another priority is to move into mobile services. In this regard, I have mentioned a number of options, with the most likely one being a virtual operator (MVNO) on the Bite network, where all paying customers are welcome. Another option would be to experiment with mobile WIMAX (something not likely to be viable until the middle of 2008). I have also mentioned that Lattelecom could forge closer ties, perhaps even buy Triatel, which runs a non-standard (for Europe) CDMA mobile phone and data network, plus an EV DO wireless broadband network (satisfactory at my country cottage 35 km outside Riga). Triatel is already cooperating with Lattelecom for installing fixed wireless telephony and landed an EU and government-financed rural broadband project.
After a bit of chatting with sources, it looks like the best fit between Lattelecom and Triatel could be in the wireless broadband space, or so some think. Triatel appears ready to be persuaded into some kind of broader, more permanent deal. The question is, how much infrastructure overlap there may be and is this not at odds with the rather strange rural wireless broadband project backed by the government? The basic idea of that project, rather than helping spread "last mile" solutions (which Triatel is) was to establish parallel wholesale infrastructure and hope that resellers would appear in the poor rural areas and have a choice of wholesalers whose internet connection they could then distribute to the rural farmsteads, huts and hovels in the forest.
Meanwhile, earlier this summer, Lattelecom announced it was buying a bunch of Alcatel point to point high capacity microwave links in order to extend its broadband reach beyond the optical and wire network. That sounds like extending infrastructure to me. Still, the last mile could be set up and sold by Triatel, especially if it was part of the Lattelecom fold. Watch these developments...:)

HP in New York

I'm off to New York on September 4 for some kind of Hewlett-Packard (HP) all day event on September 5. Piecing together some sparse e-mails from the local organizers, it will be a series of break out events on various gadgets and issues. There has not exactly been a flood of information as to what, when (and just some bios of who), but it will held at some posh hotel (the Ritz) on the Battery, far from the delights of the rest of Manhattan. Or so the month old e-mails claim. But hey, I already have my electronic ticket (in French) from HP, so thanks!
Many of the discernable events are of interest, and, hopefully, I will be able to blog and videoblog from there, both here and for my Latvian employer. I notice blogger has added a "add video"function, which means I may be able to bypass the sometime slow(to post uploads) and (therefore) dubious YouTube and the quicker alternative, blip.tv. Anyway, I will give it a test. After that, I will be off to Boston to see family and back in Latvia on September 11

Marion the librarian and Lattelecom's plan C

No, this is not the title of an Ed Wood movie along the lines of Plan 9 from Outer Space. It has to do with a credible scenario for how Lattelecom could move into mobile WiMax (thus mobile services on a new, very likely flat-fee quad-play package) over the next few years.
First-- let us recall the plans for getting into the mobile market once the connection to Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) is eventually broken. Plan A was to buy Bite, but Bite has been bought by others and the price was probably too high for Lattelecom. Plan B-- start a strongly branded and marketed Lattelecom Mobile as a virtual operator on the Bite network (everyone is welcome, the more the merrier...)
Plan C is to wait for mobile WiMax to ripen in 2008 and then go ahead and build out a WiMax network that eventually brings high speed wireless broadband and VOIP plus mobile VOIP to everywhere in Latvia that it is commercially practical. If positioned as a flat fee (though perhaps premium service) mobile WiMax with Skype or some other VOIP service would be the wireless equivalent of free calls on the Latvian network now offered as part of the Mājas komplekts (Home Package) deal.
But we are getting way ahead of events and forgetting about Marion the Librarian? Where does she come it? Lattelecom has just finished its WiMax tests and is evaluating the results. It looks like they will show the viability of the technology--after all, it works in other countries, why not here?
Also, Latvia will soon announce a tender for connecting all 800 libraries, many of them in rural villages, to high-speed broadband. If Lattelecom can win the tender with its test-proven WiMax, it will get at least partial government and European Union financing to unwire the libraries. Then, with many WiMax towers in place, it will have the bones and (some meat) of a national WiMax network, just as mobile WiMax starts to become viable.
So once Lattelecom unwires Marion the Librarian or Baiba bibliotekāre (for all you Latvian speakers) and give her the best of its megabits (do you read sexual innuendo in this? Why?) the next...conquest could be the new mobile communications market that WiMax will open up once the right handsets, antennas and base-stations are available (having built a tower for Marion/Baiba, Lattelecom will just add the new gadgets and software). And we are not too far from the handsets, since we now have multiradio gadgets coming on the market (like the Nokia N-95, talk about sexy), so adding WiMax should be no problemo.
If you ask me, by the time whoever is in the zoo called government in Latvia by late 20o8 finally decides what to do with LMT -- like closing the deal with Telenor Sonera (not a misspelling) or Deutsche Telia or Nordski Telefonski (if the Russians get a big piece of the pie when TeliaSonera is fully privatized and wheeled and dealed into something bigger than itself --OK, maybe Telenorski Telefon :))--when all this is over, Lattelecom just might be ready to go straight to Plan C. We shall ---"C"....