A long talk with Mikael Bäck, Ericsson's HSDPA honcho

It has been a while since I spoke to Mikael Bäck, Vice President of WCDMA Radio Networks at Ericsson. An interview article was published in my newspaper (in Latvian), but a series of unintended circumstances prevented it from being published by one of my major freelance outlets. So as not to let this go to waste, I am presenting, here, a rough cut transcript of our talk in Stockholm some weeks ago.
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What is HSDPA?

3G in the beginning introduced a wider radio carrier of 5 Mhz instead of 200 Khz, which gives us totally different possibilities. The first step in wideband CDMA doesn’t give us the full data capabilities, it is limited to 384 Kbps video and voice. HSDPA is the most efficient radio high data carrier that we have and we can bring theoretically even higher data rates that 14.4 Mbps over this frequency. That is up in operation today, better than anything anyone has been able to use in the world in the street. So if you compare it, the only other possibility to get these data rates is through wireless LAN in the office, which is limited.

What does this mean for business users? SMEs have internet in the office?


We believe it will be used in many different ways. The first step, partly because it is a good business case and is the easiest case is that people will be using the PC card to access internet from the laptop only. They will do what they do in the office without the cable.
Then what will come soon, is you will be able to mix voice and data in terminals, you will have a fixed terminal in some countries where in small offices you replace fixed for data. All this in combination means we will be able to address an extreme variety of needs without the operator having to invest in specific systems, as would be the case with specific systems for mobile TV and WIMAX. I think we can do a lot of things with only one infrastructure investment for the operators, and that is very much behind this.

How does it work?

It is a software upgrade from Wideband CDMA. For new operators, almost everybody is buying HSDPA ready equipment.

So, setting up a brand new operator and infrastructure, I would get HSDPA in the package?

That’s the way it works for all the new ones, if that would be in Eastern Europe or South Africa. It comes with HSDPA as the basic feature now.

How much uptake is there of HSDPA in the real world?

If you look at the uptake, I don’t know what percentage of the installed base has been upgraded, but it is a pretty good part now. It takes some time, however. We forget the marketing campaigns the operators must have before we get real users. In Europe, maybe Mobilcom in Austria is the biggest. Elsewhere it is small. Here is Sweden we don’t have it.

Why is TeliaSonera not doing it here but at their subsidiary companies Estonian Mobile Telephone and Omnitel in Lithuania?

That’s difficult to judge. In Sweden, it is a large area. In Sweden we will start in the big cities and EDGE is a feasible alternative for a lot of rural areas that are much larger in Sweden than in the Baltics. And it may also be that the competition between operators in Sweden is not so hard.

Once the phones arrive, what will be the content and the applications that are tailored to HSDPA?

Something that is a big thing already in 3G and that will take off is mobile TV. Different kind of tailored material. Either normal TV channels or content that is tailored for mobile, streamed or download pay per view or view or by different kinds of subscriptions. That is one of the things you already see in Western Europe. Quite a lot of operators have relations to a parent company that is involved in a media company. That will start quite early. 3 in Italy has no fixed line offering so they target pure competition with the DSL networks, they offer 1.8 Mbps for EUR 9.00 and will upgrade it to 3.6 Mbps and they call it ADSM. For them that’s pure competition with the higher priced fixed line. So you will see different types of alternatives coming out.
One of our customers in Japan, Vodafone KK, was recently bought out by Softbank, the biggest player in DSL in Japan and also the owner of Yahoo! Japan, so they have very advanced plans to introduce a lot of the services you see today on the internet, including voice over IP. Again we might see a trend that some of the first applications will be around in countries like Korea, Japan before they enter Europe which has traditionally been a bit slower on new services

Now that you’ve compared HSDPA to DSL, aren’t you facing the problem of being a supplier to both the fixed line operators and to the potential “cannibals” of fixed line DSL?

That’s part of our role. If you want to be one of the biggest suppliers in telecoms, it is totally unavoidable that you supply to competitors. In reality, you will have many different types of systems, WIMAX and such. It is very difficult for us to say that we will stay out of this part of the competition. We will have the easy cases, the 3s and the Vodafones that don’t have a fixed line offering. For them the positioning might be easier. But a big part of our customers, that’s the KPNs., the Telefonicas, the Telias, are very strong on the fixed and very strong on the mobile side. For them it is a very interesting internal debate on how are they going to position this. And very often, they start to position this not as cannibalizing DSL but as the businessman’s portable solution on the laptop that would not compete as much with the DSL lines, while 3 is competing directly with DSL.

You say HSDPA will be used for business. How much are you working with enterprise software companies and how will you deal with security if you have people working in the park with the SAP or Oracle ERP system and sensitive data?

We have a number of different things that will happen. If you take the device as such, you have the industry, driven by the Intels and possibly the AMDs, where today wireless LAN is integrated into the laptops. Before the Centrino, where Intel integrated wireless LAN into the motherboard, when you had separate PC cards, no-one believed that you would have wireless LAN in more than 40 % of laptops. Then it came as part of the Centrino platfom and with Intel holding an extremely large part of the laptop market, suddenly the uptake of wireless LAN on new laptops was 94 % instead of 40 %.
From my point of view, what we have tried to do with Ericsson mobile platforms in the same way as Qualcomm and other companies do, is to try to get HSDPA as integrated with laptops are wireless LAN has been. And that will come in various steps, starting with the PC card, which is the most simple. But there will be a market, and we will help to create it, where HSDPA is installed in the laptop as is. You can already buy such laptops, but the price is fairly high.

Who is making these laptops? Do you have an alliance with anyone?

If you look at what has been publicly announced, there have been announcements from Sony, from Dell, there are operators like Cingular, Vodafone, T-Mobile that are bundling, more or less hardware with the laptops. There is a small company called Flybook selling fairly expensive stylish Italian designed and today you can order one of those laptops with integrated HSDPA, not a PC card. It would be very strange if we couldn’t get it into every brand. They only problem is that if we can’t get the cost down, it will only be in the higher priced models.
Then, when it comes to how it works with the laptop, we are working with Ericsson Enterprise that is doing applications and clients for the P900 and those kinds of phones, but we will be working with that environment to create a secure environment, a simple password and SIM card handling environment. This will be important, since today the solution is a little bit too difficult. We have a separate key generator and you have to dial in a special number and get another code.

So today HSDPA equipped laptops have enterprise level security?

Yes, we use it here in Ericsson, I can use it. But it is still a bit of a hassle to set it up, because you have to create the secure tunnel. It has to be a bit simpler to be a hit in all corporations. But it is approved in all our own internal processes.

How can others do this?

A secure network can be run over HSDPA. The IT department would typically set it up, but you can purchase the solution from Ericsson or the other typical players you have, the laptop vendors and the Microsofts. That is part of the process why in some places this is very slow, these are very static parts of the organization.
The solution and the problem is the same as with wireless LAN. We don’t allow open wireless LAN at Ericsson, because then someone standing outside the building could use the network. I set up a secure tunnel and the solution is the same whether I am using wireless LAN or HSDPA.
I think it is a very impressive service, it runs at 1.8 Mbps now and will soon run at 7 or 8 Mbps. It is not as fast as the wireline network here at Ericsson, but certainly as fast as some of the fixed network DSL you could access abroad and it is enough for the kind of work I do and attachments I might need to send or receive.

What is the situation on the handset side? This is what is expected to generate all kinds of content viewing and revenue…

The first handsets will be available very after the summer, our guess is in September, that is the information we have now. We have them in the labs only. You can’t buy them on the street.

When Estonian Mobile Telephone announced its HSDPA service, it mentioned download speeds of 14.4 Mbps, which some observers received rather skeptically. What is the evolution track for HSDPA speeds and what will come after HSDPA?

If you take what we have defined as HSPA today – the D has disappeared because that refers to downlink and we have an evolution for both the downlink and the uplink– and if we could build as fast as possible according to the standard, it allows 14.4 Mbps on the downlink and up to 5 Mbps on the uplink. So it is up to us vendors to design the equipment. Today our system can run 3.6 Mbps with the release that is out there, in the Baltic States, for example. The PC cards and the terminals can run 1.8 Mbps. Then in the next release that will come out around Christmas will have the possibility to run in the network at 14.4 Mbps. It seems like the biggest part of the devices will go for 7.2 Mbps and maybe not higher for a while, maybe with an enhanced upload.

When you talk about devices, you mean PC cards, phones. But are there any other devices coming out, perhaps TV-like tablets?

Not so much has been announced yet by suppliers, but in reality if we have a market of small modules performing HSDPA operations, there is nothing preventing this device from being the communication device between tablets, between iPods or whatever kind of device that communicates and that is up to the device makers. And it depends on the price point coming down.

Using iPod as a general term for all these music devices, can we see iPods with HSDPA coming out soon?

Absolutely. If you look at the pure silicon part that does HSDPA, it is small enough to be inside anything. Then it is a question of how it will be sold, in small plastic modules or whatever, Maybe it could be difficult to integrate in the small iPod Nano size, but there is no reason it shouldn’t be in any kind of device.

So you could have an Mp3 player that is always on and searching for any kind of entertainment that is available?

That is my guess for one of the killer apps if you don’t take the normal broadband laptop broadband market. Being always connected to music, be it iTunes or the like, is an obviously very interesting market.

What about TV on demand, or TV that comes on when it detects something of interest? Say, during an election campaign, a candidate of interest is appearing in a news spot?


There is TV up and running and we have been doing tests to see which kind of data rates we can get and how that will affect TV service. At our recent event in Rome we showed a quite big, normal 32 inch display where we streamed two videos one over 384 kbps over wideband CDMA and the other HSDPA and it was an extremely good picture on the HSDPA.

So, assuming coverage, you could go out on a sailboat and watch HSDPA TV through a phone and a 20 inch LCD screen?

You will do that! But when you are talking about only downlink, you will always have competition from normal TV service. What will happen is that interaction will come more and more into these type of services. A device that cannot communicate will be less and less interesting. That will be one of the other killer apps.
One of the most important battles in the industry is now going on in Australia and can be followed on the internet because it is extremely public. What Telstra is doing is using HSDPA to cover the desert in the middle of Australia with extremely few sites. We provide them with a system that can run, as we have demonstrated in the desert up to 80 kilometers and can run up to 200 kilometers from one site, basically normally over water. And we can take care of the delay that would come over that distance.
In the desert from a high mast we can reach 1.8 Mbps over 79 kilometers distance.

So basically you are competing with WIMAX?

Absolutely, from that point of view. We are doing that in a good way, because WIMAX doesn’t exist, which is always a drawback. The WIMAX we have today are the pre-versions and not what will be the real WIMAX coming out from Intel in, say 2008. So we have a very interesting market window.

Is there a name for this service? I understand WCDMA runs on frequencies that don’t propagate very far?

What Telstra is doing is running this on 850 Mhz, which is better. But in many areas, as long as you have not really line of sight, but not many things in between, or you use a high mast or a high mountain, then you can propagate quite far with the 2100 Mhz. maybe not 200 kilometers, but if you reach 80 kilometers, it is an extreme distance.

In Latvia and some other East European countries, we have CDMA 450 operators who say they can deliver wireless broadband at 1 Mbps or under optimal conditions, over 2 Mbps. Where does this system, EV DO, fit in with HSDPA?

It (HSDPA) is a wider band and the laws of physics decide how many bits per second you can get out of a piece of spectrum. The CDMA is only 1.25 Mhz and the wideband CDMA is 5 Mhz. So the CDMA systems will be limited unless you add frequencies. The highest possible data rate you can get with CDMA is around 2 Mbps, while it is theoretically around 40 Mbps for wideband. If the theoretical limit is 2 Mbps, then you will have difficultly getting 1 Mbps unless you are the only user on the system.
My view is that realistically the 450 band is very difficult, it has good propagation. It was used in NMT for voice, but for any kind of data services, it is very difficult to use.

In Latvia we have Triatel, the CDMA operator, selling these solutions out of a box, voice and internet, and allying recently with Lattelecom to build out the network with wireless in the countryside. Ar you saying that HSDPA is the better solution for providing really fast broadband in the countryside?

The problem with CDMA 450 is that it will work perfectly well for voice, it will work as well as the (analog) NMT 450 system did, but with smaller telephones, It will be very good for voice, not for other things. Unless you create something very new, the 450 band is not good for data. In Europe you use the 2100 Mhz, the 1800 Mhz bands, the 900 and 850 Mhz.

So if the telcos, such as Lattelecom in Latvia, want to offer wireless broadband in the 10 Mbps range, as they are offering in the cities, they will have to turn to HSPA?

That is my view, If I look the things I have been working with with wideband and before wideband, HSDPA is the absolutely the single item that is creating interest on the market among both the end users, the operators, the content industry. I think this will be looked back upon as a very important step for going away from cable broadband services.

So you are saying that when it is all developed, networks, terminals etc., it will be as fast broadband as anyone with normal consumer or enterprise needs will require?

That is my view. In reality all types of DSL services are limited by the distance to the station, and in most places you will be limited to around 10 Mbps if you are not living close to the station. So the only way to get much higher rates is fiber to the user, which is very expensive. So we will see different behaviors on different markets. In the Nordic countries, it is difficult to see this kind of fiber development, in the US you might see that trend.

What is over the horizon after HSPA? How fast can radio transmit data?

We can go very high and what we are doing now is introducing the next step in standardization that we call long-term evolution where we will use wider bands, which is realistic in Europe, up to 20 Mhz, which means you will be able to transmit 100 Mbps, in reality up to 200 Mbps. You can go even higher with wider bands, but those are hard to find, frequencies are a limited resource.

So if there is going to be an HSPA 2.0 it won’t go higher than 200 Mbps?

I think that will be a practical limitation for quite some time. And it is difficult to forsee needs that you will not be able to serve with that kind of capacity.
A problem we are working on today is latency, something that happens on GSM and GPRS can be hundreds of milliseconds and affects such applications as gaming or protocols where you have a lot of acknowledgement will have performance lags. What we are doing with HSDPA is getting those latencies down to 75 milliseconds and we may get it down to 10 milliseconds, which will open up a whole world when it comes to voice over IP, push to talk, where delay is an issue.

You can run VOIP on HSDPA today?

Yes. It works well.

So we are back to creating more cannibals, aren’t we?

It is up to price model and the operator. If you charge a high amount for the voice and low for the date, you create that kind of cannibalism issue.

Ok, but if you want to sell lots of data services at attractive rates and you have that other company across the Baltic Sea (Nokia) releasing phones with WLAN capability, what is going to happen to GSM voice revenues?

Of course you see already today a trend toward lower cost for voice and different types of bundlings. You have that kind of development whatever you do. In Sweden we have had drastic price changes in just half a year.

But if the network sees many phones as just IP devices, then your call to another one of them will simply be part of some flat rate data service…

This is a fairly complicated market. If you look at the internet and the enterprise networks, then voice is a very small component in a data network. On the mobile networks, voice is 99 % of the traffic. Operators will try to block Skype type of services for a while, then they will come to their senses. But it will not be a technology issue, it will be how operators package these things, how they offer voice over IP.

Still, thinking about HSDPA, I am reminded of the 1980s Gremlins movies, where these nice fuzzy creatures got let into an office building, then they got wet and turned into these raging little monsters that tore the place apart. Hasn’t HSDPA put the Gremlins into the GSM building?

It would be very strange if certain things that happened on the fixed networks didn’t happen on the mobile side. It is so that most operators don’t want to lose control and become a bit pipe. They are opening up the bit pipe but trusting that there are no devices that make it easy to use, like it is impractical to use Skype on a laptop, you don’t walk around with it and talk. The first devices are expensive, so there will be some time to fiddle around with the strategies and these first devices won’t hit as hard as they did on the fixed lines. But this is big question that operators are working on.
Also, the application development for mobile phones is not as fast as the extremely fast application development happening on the internet side. You will have two markets meeting. If you go to an all IP world on the terminals, which has to happen, of course there will a lot of players like the Googles and the Yahoos that will want to get into this business the same way mobile players are trying to replace the fixed line DSLs. We have been talking about convergence, but it has not happened, it has mainly been bundling of different offerings. Here it is very obvious that this is convergence. You will have the same type of services and then you will have some really strong tools in the mobile environment, that you will have mobility which you are not used to from the fixed line side. We are working a lot with IMS to create an environment where you have presence information, so you tailor your offerings a lot more, location based and so on.

So IMS is important for HSDPA?

IMS is formally a separate thing but it comes together very much, IMS if you don’t have a good bearer will not be as strong. Of course IMS is for both the fixed line networks and the wireless LANS and HSDPA. But for me the strong correlation is with HSDPA.

So if you are at home watching a football game on TV and you are called to the office and have an IMS compliant device, you can continue watching it on your mobile in a cab…

That is one of the extremely strong offerings that could come from us to operators and to the end user. But it is also fair to say that this type of development will take quite a long time, maybe not for us, but this is quite a big change if you look at world most operators are living in, how they sell phones and distribute content. It is quite a big change and it will take some time. But one thing we have seen with mobile broadband and with mobile telephony is that if you want to have a fast uptake, it is a very good step to take a service that is existing already, such as telephony was existing in the fixed line network and move that to mobile telephony, because you have an immediate understanding of what the service is for me as an end user. The same goes for mobile broadband, if you take what you have in the office or on the home DSL and move that to a mobile environment. People understand how to use it and why they want to have it. The same could go for TV as well. Whatever the TV you have at home, or the IP TV coming on now, you would be able to take it with you when you walk out of the home. You understand why I want that and so on..

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So that is it, not the usual blog format.

Fiber in the Lattelecom diet

Lattelecom's subsidiary Citrus Solutions will soon announce that it is offering to run fiber to the home (FTTH) in all new housing projects going up in Latvia, starting with the greater Riga area. This is a direct response to Latvenergo, the power utility's, FTTH projects at a new apartment block and a single family housing development in the Latvian capital. FTTH can deliver 100 Mbps or more, practically unlimited bandwidth. A significant deployment of FTTH will put Latvia in the forefront of this technology, about the only one that can compete with some of the high speed wireless stuff, like my 300 to 600 Kbps in the summer cottage yard Triatel connection, HSDPA (coming this fall) and some WIMAX or pre-WIMAX technology to be deployed by Unistars and Telecentrs. Look, also, for Lattelecom's fiber-to-the curb/building that will run up to 24 Mbps into urban residences and offices.
The illustration is of how it is to sit here, random mosquitos hovering, on the Triatel connection.

Baltcom enters mid-teenage

Baltcom, the cable TV, internet and fixed telecommunications company has come a long way since founder Peteris Šmidre and a few other guys spent a sleepless, nervous night individually tuning dozens of German television sets to around 40 channels of cable at the Hotel de Rome in the early 90s. The hotel was Baltkom's (as it called itself at the time) first major customer and the German PAL standard TVs, it seemed, did not auto-tune to the cable channels.
Since then, Baltcom has reached its mid-teens and will be celebrating its 15th birthday on June 29 with a party. The company now has around 150 000 cable subscribers (I am guessing this figure out of my head here in the hammock), as well as a fixed telephony and internet users (quite a few of them on Baltcom's triple-play offer).
Another major accomplishment for Baltcom was launching the second mobile operator in Latvia, now called Tele2. Šmidre made an unsucessful bid for the "third" GSM and UMTS licence that was bought by Bite last year. The "Golden Fish/Zelta zivtiņa" prepaid card brand launched by Baltcom remains one of the strongest trademarks on the Latvian telecoms market, with even rival Okarte cards and the plethora of other pre-paids being called, generically zivtiņas (fish) in popular useage.
Having said that, it doesn't look like Baltcom is planning any major announcements to coincide with its birthday. HDTV has been hinted at, but there is only one real European HD channel, which shows mostly HD demo stuff, nature scenes, mating spiders where you can count the hairs on their legs, etc.
The company may make the rather unspectacular but smart move of repackaging its 103 channels of digital TV into interest group oriented packages. 103 sounds like a lot, but it includes a number of narrow interest and, frankly, weirdo-sounding channels such as the Korean-language Arirang, the Wine Channel and some Russian-language channels dedicated to comedy and ( I am guessing) fishing? Nothing wrong with Russian, since the typical cable TV customer is supposed to be a Russian granny/babushka. But that may change and that certainly isn't where the money is.
Look for Baltcom to repackage more like rival IZZI, which has less channels but definite interest-group (music, science/documentary, news etc.) packages for a moderate subscription fee for each. Lattelecom with its IPTV is also going the low price package route, though they have yet to offer a solution that can be viewed on "real" TV sets through a decoder. Meanwhile, Baltcom internet subscribers on or near the optical network may be offered a form of IPTV.
The more interesting plans are further down the road. By the time Baltcom "comes of age" (at 18), it may well be a pan-Baltic cable/electronic communications operation. My wish, should that happen, is that all programming on PanBaltcom will be original sound with local/Russian subtitling. The Latvian or Russian mumbler/murmulis dubbing the soundtrack must be ended at long last.
I am adding yet another photo from the outdoors (an undisclosed :) plant that has simply sprouted at an undisclosed location). Let's make some hemp butter, anyone??

Happy Midsummer/Jāņi to all

This is the eve of the most "Latvian" of all national holidays, Jāņi or Midsummer, which is the shared name-day of Jānis (June 24) and Līga (a female name, June 23). Jāņi are celebrated the night – all night by tradition– from Līga's day to Jānis' day and the time is often called The Līgo Evening (Līgo vakars). This has less to do with Līga, more with the endless number of friendly mocking, drinking and sometimes bawdy songs sung with the refrain "līgo, līgo", which means to rock or swing. If this is getting complicated to non-Latvians, it should :). If you are not confused enough, ask a Latvian friend to play the old Čikāgas piecīši (a satirical singing group) record with the track in English explaining Jāņi, when «Latvians burn blacktop in barrels".
Anyway, Baltic and Nordic readers will find this familiar, as June 23, by accident of calendar, is also Midsummer in Sweden, Norway, Finland, as well as in Lithuania and Estonia. The Danes are always romping around with beer bottles in their hands (so I remember an evening in Copehagen many years ago) so perhaps there is no special midsummer for them (or am I covering up my ignorance/knowledge with special needs on these matters?).
Unlike the Nordics, who preserve their work week by always celebrating Midsummer on a Friday, Latvians always celebrate June 23-24, which is an ordinary weekend next year, but becomes interesting again in 2008, when the festivities will run again from Friday night to back-to-work Tuesday,
In many other places, the idea of Midsummer (India, for instance, where it is summer all year long)must be strange, and this is just a way of explaining to readers in such places why I am wishing all my readers, etc. who understand what Jāņi/Midsummer is, PLEASE HAVE A SAFE AND GREAT ONE.

More comments, please :)

My post about surfing under the shady apple tree generated some nice longer comments from Solnyshok and other readers. This is great stuff, I really want to see the blog become a bit more of a community of opinion and information.
Putting the brakes on high volume file transfers is not unique to wireless operators such as (allegedly) Triatel. My oldest son, a student in Umeå, Sweden was sharing an apartment (one of several residences of the nomadic young) with another person, which had a 10 Mbps internet connection. One of their first roomate debates was "who blew the limit" of some dozens of GB allowed by the fixed network ISP. There is also some limit on the use he can have at his present student dormitory room which has symetrical 10/10 internet access.
I am waiting for Bite to launch its HSDPA 2 Mbps service in the fall (I will be back in town then :( ). This is the real rival to EV DO and fixed line DSL in summer cottages and outlying single family houses (which sounds like Solnyshok's living arrangements?). Then again, if Triatel gets some 850 Mhz frequencies, they may be able to match HSDPA Mb for Mb. I hope Bite will offer some kind of free standing transciever for the fixed user who wants to link it to a WiFi home network. After all, they promise 22 channels of TV, and it is better viewed on a monitor than a phone screen.
If I have time, I may post most of a raw transcript of my interview with Michael Bäck, the Ericsson vice president in charge of HSDPA. I talked to him in May, some of the interview went into my paper, but it didn't, for various reasons, get into IDG News, for whom I also string.

A Latvian wish-list for Google

Kristaps Kaupe, a erudite (meaning I sometimes don't understand WTF he is writing about :) ) blogger on IT matters, sports and politics (alas, on the wacko side of radical nationalism but then, my oldest son, about Kristap's age, has taken up with some Swedish loonie-zoonie socialist - as in the great economic disaster of the 20th century - party, and we must respect the choices of young adults :) )...anyway, Kristaps in his Latvian language blog has taken note of Google's intention to localize many of its services.
Kristaps then makes a wish list that will be pretty hard for Google to meet, not only in Latvia, but in a lot of small countries with little-known languages. Here is what he would like:

Google Maps that knows Latvian towns, villages and ponds (Google Earth actually thinks it does, and I spotted some bizarre stuff :) )
Google Adsense with Latvian language ads (I think you have to make Latvian advertisers aware of the medium, there are ads in other languages, I would guess)
BookSearch that includes Latvian books from Latvian libraries (as digitization/scanning proceeds, this may be possible and maybe Google can help speed things along)
Google SMS to reach Latvian mobile operators. (Latvian mobile operators, are you listening?)
And finally, this is the real tough one -- Google Translate to translate texts from Japanese to Latvian. Seems that Kristaps has been doing some searches that lead him to Japanese pages he has no idea what they say...

So there it is, the essence of the Google Everywhere challenge - an ordinary, smart 20-something user in a small country with potential decades of Google use and loyalty ahead of him if Google can at least fulfill some of his wish list. Can it....?

Widgettron comes to Latvia, 2007

This, again, comes from the hammock, what you see is our shed.

In the summer of 2007, the mid-sized European doohickey manufacturer Widgettron started operations in Latvia with a manufacturing plant and logistics center near Riga Airport. Riga was the first place where Widgettron would manufacture doohickeys in a major diversification move away from its traditional widgets. It chose the site because of Latvian skills in making ķiņkēziņi, which roughly translates as doohickeys.
Moving into the industrial park, Widgettron found a pre-installed fiber optic network and a web address to go to to set up and start the connection.
Plugging her laptop into the port, the new Widgettron Latvia SIA managing director Mara Zarina (Stanford MBA 2004, Riga Tech 2001) instantly got a menu that said: "What would you like to do today"?
Basically, it was a link to Lattelecom BPO, which offered her a choice of "build your back office" modules. Already there were 60 e-mails on Mara's Blackberry (courtesy of Bite), all of then ardently interested in buying doohickeys. So the first thing Mara clicked on was a set of windows for configuring a order intake and customer relations management (CRM) system. One would also need an inventory management system and, eventually, some kind of megasystem to run the whole Latvian operation and link it to the rest of Widgettron Europe.
Since Mara was setting up a new and largely independent doohickey business, Widgettron left it up to her to pick the IT solutions, together with Antons (MIT 2000), the CIO/CTO rolled into one (and speaking of rolled, he skateboarded around the largely empty manufacturing building, connecting doohickey assembly machines to the network ports in the floor).
By the summer of 2007, Lattelecom BPO, thanks to its cooperation with Big (guess what color), Larry E, Bill, the Germans and others could offer a suite of on-line, on demand business support services, most of them electronic but some involving staff such as call centers and web-based help services.
Upon closer examination of her e-mails, Mara saw that there were two huge potential orders. Bardakchik of St. Petersburg wanted 100 000 doohickeys practically yesterday for putting inside its matroschka dolls, and a Swedish company wanted the same for its line of talking stuffed reindeer. This meant there would be a lot of customer queries -- how do I make the doohickey sing in Russian or chatter in Swedish (or Lapp, for that matter, considering the most likely language of the reindeer)? So Mara immediately put in a request for provisioning of call center capacity in both Russian and Swedish. The appropriate toll free numbers, reachable by VOIP to Lattelecom's POPs in Moscow and Stockholm, would appear on the customer web-based order portal (these were being generated in Russian, Swedish and other languages using a toolset available from the Lattelecom BPO).
By the end of week one, Widgettron Latvia had set up, simply by using its fiber-optic connection to Lattelecom, a functioning CRM and order taking system, inventory and supply chain, manufacturing process management and an ERP metasystem from Larry (yes, Fusion worked at last) but with its on-line ordering portal running on something from Big Guess What Color. Also included were VOIP, e-mail and videoconferencing on demand. In fact, all of these services were on-demand with pre-signed service-level agreements.
And you know what, except for a number of local PCs (well, Intel Macs, Widgettron believes in cool :)), the company never installed a single server nor DVD disk with any of its core business systems. All that stuff was running, virtualized, somewhere in the caves and bunkers where Lattelecom, a company formerly know as a telco, kept its web accessible business operations services platform hardware.

P.S. This is a kind of vision thing, what is done in this fantasy is something all fixed network telcos will have to do or simply die.
And yes, I did have an interesting and visionary chat with those IBM honchos :).

Under the shady apple tree

I am reclined on a swing sofa with my Apple Powerbook G4 under an apple tree in the yard of my family summer house in Carnikava, writing this blog online through an adequately fast Triatel wireless internet connection (EV-DO) and a D-Link wireless router. My son, 10, is inside also surfing with his laptop, some kind of Windows machine.
This is what always on is all about. A wonderful sunny afternoon, gentle breeze and the whole world just a click away. Next summer, I imagine I can try an HSDPA connection that promises up to 3.6 Mbps (the Triatel is benchmarked at around 1 Mbps, but does between 256 Kbps and 600 Kbps).
Nice as this is, I sort of feel compelled to fold up the computer and do my one big Saturday pleasure -- read The Economist (for once, it actually got delivered on Saturday to my Riga apartment so I could drive out here with it). I will write some more stuff later about another future vision for Lattelecom and stuff they may be doing for the European Parliament.

The semimadre goes to Spain

The half-mother (semimadre) of Lattelecom, TeliaSonera, has bought 80 % of the Spanish mobile operator Xfera with the intent to fully develop its 3G mobile services. Xfera actually doesn't do anything yet (except keep a 3G licence in hand), which is why the move led to a plunge of TeliaSonera shares on the Stockholm Stock Exchange once the deal was announced. Press reports say TeliaSonera will put up to SEK 9 billion into the fledgling operator to get 3G services up and running across Spain.
What is interesting for us is that the semimadre seems to be reaching south rather than east across the Baltic, where, according to the word on the street, further talks on the Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) for Lattelecom and cash swap have made no progress. The government troika has not met on the matter and no progress has been made in naming an appraiser to set values for all the companies involved in the deal.
Behind the Xfera deal is a man with a forehead bloodied by battering at the doors of the Latvian government, TeliaSonera's Baltic/Nordic honcho Kenneth Karlberg. There are a number of versions about this. One is that the Swedes are tired of Karlberg's fruitless pounding and have somewhat rethought their Baltic/Eastern strategy. They asked Kenneth to open a southern front and he did.
Having done that, Karlberg may be a step closer to moving up the ladder to replace the main honcho at TeliaSonera, Anders Igel should he retire or be eased out. Whether the Xfera deal flies may be an important test for Kenneth. (this is, of course, all mutterings and rumors after drinking beers and Asbach Uralt at the office after work today).
Should that happen, I don't think Kenneth will forget the Baltic home market (like a home where you don't have a key to one of the doors :) ), but he will seek medium-risk opportunities wherever they come up, at least in Europe. Lattelecom is most likely written off, and LMT will come along in due time, I would say, 2008, when the dust (and dried manure) from the elections settles and the new baboon pride settles into its cages. By then, competition may have knocked a few corners off LMT, giving good reason to cut its appraisal price a bit, while the possible success of Lattelecom's new strategy of becoming a business process utility and media portal will have increased its barter value. In other words, letting Lattelecom do what it pleases, even if it disrupts the semimadre's own plans, may be the best way to increase the value of the 49 % of Lattelecom owned by the Swedes. More about that in a subsequent post.
The next post may come from my summer cottage, where a test of Triatel's EVDO internet link is proving initially satisfactory, with the claimed 1 Mbps link getting anywhere between 256 and 600 Kbps, about the same real world fluctuating performance as my Lattelecom Apollo HomeDSL line in the Riga apartment (though generally the DSL tries to stay close to 1 Mbps).

Music: none
Recreational substances: Aldaris Legenda Beer (two bottles) and around 100 grams of Asbach much earlier this evening.

Lattelecom and Big Blue up to something?

Lattelecom is hosting some IBM honchos, whom I will meet later in the day. The gist of this is that something interesting is going on. Clearly, whatever its plans for steroidizing the DSL connections of its customers, Lattelecom realizes that all that does is make a fatter bit pipe. And nobody wants to be left holding just the bit pipe.
So my guess is that there is some kind of corporate network/application provision idea in the works. Think if Lattelecom could offer businesses ready-made IBM solutions over the net, computing on demand, whatever. Web 2.0 for businesses and all that.
Just a guess.
Not listening to aging hippy music, not sipping whiskey or toking joints. I have my Hunter Thompson writing urges under control. But I love the man's work. A shame he punched out...

Cookies for those with special needs

Been a busy week, not much happening since the last post, but yesterday (Monday) 620 participants from 46 countries blew into Riga for a major international shindig on e-inclusion. At first I was skeptical, this was another event for the (to use politically incorrect speech) lame, halt, blind and the huddled masses yearning for bandwidth. However, the event seems more than relevant, with the European Union's main information society honchess (and scourge of roaming fees)Viviane Reding saying that inclusion in the form of bandwith can boost your country or region's GDP by up to 1 percentage point. She also ranked out (haven't used that expression since junior high school) Latvia as no 23 for enterprise use of the internet and IT (outta 25 EU member nations, one has to at least whisper shit under one's breath which I didn't, as I was sitting across from the lady at a press breakfast). Meanwhile, household internet use ranked no. 13 in the EU, which is not so bad as one would have to want to whisper shit under one's breath.
Anyway, for those of you who wonder what exactly a press breakfast is, aside from the information and quote gathering opportunity for us journalists, it consisted of cookies, tea and coffee. Somewhere, in the real press room for this event, there was a rumor of croissants.
As far as the objects of this conference (at the Hotel Reval Latvia), I noticed two wheelchair bound people eating at ad hoc tables (one at the juice and water table for lunch, the other at an internet access desk). Everyone else was supposed to eat at stand-up tables. Rather bizarre, given the subject of the conference and the exhibition of various software and other gadgets for assisting those with special needs – computerized lip reading, even a data base and management tool for re-integrating and rehabilitating ex-convicts (good to know where the fuckers are and what they are doing, at least).
Anyway, came away from that event – much other stuff to do for my day job, wish they would finally hire another IT capable journalist– quite impressed.

Music behind this semi-coherent post: The Eagles, Take it Easy; Jefferson Airplane, Come Up the Years; Jimi Hendrix, Freedom; Boston, Smokin; Grateful Dead, Dark Star (live version).

Mind altering substances: Ballantine's whiskey, around 100 grams/

Wished for, but unavailable mind-altering substances: Northern Light, one joint, or a bowl of dark and dreamy hash.

Sad news, weird news from Lattelecom

Baiba Paegle, In Memoriam
The sad news is that Baiba Paegle, the chief executive of Lattelecom BPO, formally known as C1, died on June 5 after a long illness. Baiba contributed immensely to building up C1 and was a close advisor and confidant to Lattelecom's top management. Her death, while not unexpected, was nonetheless a shock to the Lattelecom community. Baiba was a women at the peak of her career and abilities. I would guess she was in her early 50s and is survived by three grown children, according to my information
Personally, she was a good source and very supportive of my journalistic and blogging efforts. I shall remember her from the last time we met in person, in the fall of 2005 at a conference in Stockholm, where she, Lattelecom CEO Nils Melngailis and I discussed their visions for the future of the company sitting in the cafe/bar of a hotel. I will remember her from that time, when she was at her shining best.

The weird news
The Procurement Monitoring Bureau, a Latvian state agency, has informed Lattelecom that, because of its 51 % state ownership and the fact that it is involved, together with the Latvian Post Office, in creating and delivering an electronic signature system, it falls under the rather strict and bureaucratic Latvian Public Procurement Law for all of its purchases. This means that everything Lattelecom buys for a larger amount (over LVL 70 000, I believe) is subject to the same kind of rather bureaucratic tender (and above all, slow) tender procedures that government ministries and agencies spending taxpayer money must use. Not exactly something for a telco that has to get more nimble every day. Interestingly, the Public Procurement Law excludes procurement for providing electronic communications services or for building electronic communications networks. But the head of the Procurement Monitoring Bureau, Andrejs Tiknuss, insists that the law should be applied to Lattelecom. A Lattelecom manager, informed of the new strictures and asked what they meant for the company, replied in a one-word SMS -- shit! Lattelecom will most likely contest this ruling both on the basis of the text of the law and on business logic. The public service of providing an e-signature is an insignificant part of the company's overall business of providing telecommunications services (and all that other stuff, BPO, whatever) in a competitive, commercial market.

Bite and Vodafone, get the f**k off my newspage!

While idling away some time here at the big SAP conference in Paris, I decided to check out what was going on back in Latvia. So I checked out my Apollo page and got just the barest glimpse of a story that the Wacko-loonie Light (the serious wacko-loonies are most of the other political parties) party New Era (Jaunais Laiks) was leading the polls. Then bang, an impenetrable green curtain rolled down telling me what a hotshit partnership Bite and Vodafone is. I am sure they are, but my clicking to make the Green Curtain go away took me to an even bigger advertisment page.
Now I do think Bite is cool and if they get HSDPA going as promised, I may even get a second SIM card just for that, say, next summer if the coverage reaches my summer house. But for fuck's sake I don't like this pesterware dropping down in front of the main news item and forcing me to read this ad. It is bad enough that there are some other things randomly floating around, like shit in a duckpond. Who thought of this, anyway and how well are these advertising agencies serving their clients? I realize that banners and sidebars are ignored, but there has to be a kinder, gentler way to push your ads.
Also, Vodafone just lost enough money to buy Latvia two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, does it have to spend its advertising money on this irritating shit?

Some impressions of SAP in Paris

The SAP ERP system is on such a scale that, in terms of Latvia, you could run TWFC* on it. And it seems that is what may be done, as one of the major implementations is at the Latvian Ministry of Finance. The ambition is to compose next year's state budget on the system, getting inputs from all the ministries, etc. Should be interesting.
What I am also trying to say is that the small countries with relatively small businesses are a limited market for these massively capable systems, except to the extent that the small and medium-sized businesses (medium globally, being, say, Lattelecom) will have to eventually integrate with global companies running SAP or brand X. The vision here is of a total electronic information and management nervous system -- you place an order online in Bangkok and it, via three layers of subcontactors, turns on a factory in Latvia that makes a subwidget for the order, and then the ultimate customer in Borneo can drill down and see exactly when the subwidget was made.
This kind of knowledge and information saturation makes it possible, as Shai Agassi framed it, to "drive (a business) while seeing forward." When you think about it, most businesses steer by looking back at what happened. Interesting.
It also means that businesses have to define themselves and their processes very precisely and carefully. It is of little use to "drill down" to the benchmarks and metrics for a particular manufacturing step if one has not defined or determined them and manufactures on the general assumption that most of the stuff will somehow turn out OK as it has, generally speaking, in the past. In this regard, the capabilities of SAP and enterprise resource planning systems generally expose the blindness of much of business to its own essential processes.
So SAP and its like are inevitably coming and businesses in Latvia that don't want to be roadkill in the next few years must adapt.

*the whole fuckin' country (what did you think :) )

The Lattelecom snake and the IT rodent

Eating something big is a visible process in snakes, you see its lunch after it is eaten as it is slowly crushed and digested inside the snake. In this case, Lattelecom is the snake and its apparently willing lunch was the company formerly known as MicroLink. And there lies the problem--a well known brand with not only customer recognition but employee loyalty as well – is not going down inside the snake very smoothly.
I would not be writing this if I had not heard it from two different sources in the Latvian IT industry. Pulling down the old battleflag of MicroLink and getting everyone to salute the Siamese twin snowboarders (Lattelecom Technology, the new "us" ??) is not an easy task. It doesn't help that one of the battle hardened generals (Janis Bergs, who founded, as Fortech, and headed MicroLink in Latvia) has left with his own little army (buying out the local MicroLink software development unit FMS).
This is not to say that it is impossible, because Lattelecom has to get its IT act together, there is no alternative. If management understand how mission critical it is helping all them former Linkers or whatever they called themselves to rally to the twins, then the job should get done. But at least this explains some of the stories circulating about Lattelecom's merger hurdles.

Citywide WiFi in Riga
Lattelecom has announced that it will wire the 150 or so public urinals and places for writing obscenities and smashing safety glass (the kind that turns to granules) for drunken fun -- also know as phone booths, into WiFi base stations to blanket most of downtown Riga with outdoor WiFi. This will require one to, I suppose, to buy a subscription card to the service. On the other hand, since I don't foresee sitting in Vermanis Park with this laptop on January 3, 2007, describing the snowfall, I could imagine the city or even Lattelecom simply declaring these hotspots to be free for the summer at least. As we do not have a cybercafe on every corner, there would not be too many people screaming about unfair competition and all that. It would be a great promotion for tourism -- free wireless Riga. It would also upstage the E-stonians, those folks to the north of us who are born with IP addresses instead of names (there are Estonian, sorry E-stonian names that will not be missed if you try pronouncing them -- Kukakmägikaksikolmiterviseksi and the like.)
Jokes aside, I am expecting comments from E-stonia about how they were first with the free wireless city internet, which may well be true...
As for me, I am in Paris at the moment, attending the SAP event here over the next few days. If you chopped off fingers and toes for every Latvian company that can actually use and afford SAP (the heavy-duty ERP system and all its variations), you would probably still have an intact foot. But this is more a look at the future than at today's reality.

The summer of WIMAX??

It looks like it may be a summer when some WIMAX experiments are launched in Latvia, aimed, however, at different markets. Unistars, a provider of wireless broadband for business, is probably going to start a major marketing campaign to raise its profile in the B2B sector, presenting WIMAX as a platform for secure and cost-effective access to business processes. Telecentrs, a rival, may also launch its wide-area broadband solution as soon as June or July, possibly with more of a consumer and household oriented approach.
Anyway, with Triatel already offering small-business and household «in a box» wireless internet and telecommunications solutions, and with Bite promising to offer HSDPA with stable 2 Mbps when it launches its 3G service in the fall, it looks like a boom-time and wide range of choice for those who don't want their netsurfing or even their business process platform at the end of a length of copper wire.

Moving right along...on the LMT deal

TeliaSonera and the Latvian government are understood to be close to agreement on how to make an appraisal of Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) and Lattelecom so that both sides can move along on getting the appraisal done and coming to an agreement on how to swap TeliaSonera's (49 %) Lattelecom stake plus some cash for the rest of LMT. It now looks like the appraisal will be made by two companies, which are tentatively acceptable to both parties. Since appraising a non-listed company is difficult, the parties are ready to accept a consensus of two as the benchmark for further talks.

Bizarro rumors..
..are being spread by the sometimes crackpot-leaning Neatkariga Rita Avize (NRA), which writes that TeliaSonera wants to unseat Lattelecom CEO Nils Melngailis because they are unhappy with his management and with the profitability of fixed network operator. While Melngailis undoubtedly places somewhat different accents on priorities (his mission, after all, is to increase the value of Lattelecom, which sorta also increases the value of the stakeholding), the Swedes would be utter fools to tamper with him at this time. Until a final deal is made, Lattelecom is one of the means of payment for LMT. Creating turbulence around the management of Lattelecom is like having a pocket full of EUR to pay for something, and then dissing the euro, so that your potential payment looses value. Indeed, if the Swedes were totally Machiavellian (which they were not) and if instead of Melngailis, Lattelecom was run by a baboon on nitrous oxide, the smartest thing for TeliaSonera would be to say the baboon was a fantastic CEO who just happens to get a little carried away with twirling his own tail and laughing hysterically about it.
Why so? Because it is to TeliaSonera's advantage now to make Lattelecom appear like the greatest thing since soft cheese spread. Indeed, the better the company looks, the less the Swedes will have to reach into their cash till to pay on top of their swap. Once the deal is done, Lattelecom is not the Swedes' problem any more. Simple as that.

And now I'm paranoid...
..,because the word is out that some PR-related people are looking into Melngailis' background, his business interests outside of Lattelecom, what banks he deals with, even whether one of his children attends school in Britain. Now that makes me wonder whether the article in the Zoonie-tunes, sorry, NRA has its roots in the so-called black PR business in Latvia. It seems that someone is seeking innocent ingredients for a witches' brew.
For the record, Nils Melngailis is, as we say back in the hood, my homeboy, from the Boston area Latvian community, and he was briefly my pupil in the Boston Latvian Saturday School in like 1970-whatever, when i was a 20-something hippie (I think I taught some Latvian lessons still stoned from Friday night smoking grass on my parent's house front porch in Newton, MA, I remember I had the kids pound the table to imitate the hooves of German Knights of the Cross crusader horses riding into ancient Latvia, why, exactly, I don't remember). However, between then and now both Nils and I left the hood and I really don't know much of what he did, except it included some upper echelon business intelligence stuff at IBM in Great Britain and a stint at Coopers & Lybrand in Latvia.

Lattelecom goes to 10 Mbps in some places

Lattelecom starting May 22 will offer 10 Mbps DSL speeds for 11.99, the same as its basic 512 kbps Home DSL. This was predicted on the blog some time ago. Unfortunately, the news leaked out as I was away in Stockholm and I could not check out all the details. One possibly personally disappointing aspect is that the 10 Mbps service will be offered in outlying areas of Riga, mostly the Soviet-era new suburbs (some pretty grim architecture) where competition has been the most intense from actors like Balticom (10Mbps from a respectable service) and others, some of whom are fly-by-night. I live in the Centra (Central) district of Riga and there is no clear word that the new service will be available there immediately. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised when I get back to Latvia in the evening. Whatever the outcome for me (still enjoying 1 Mbps at home after paying LVL 1.99 extra per month), I am glad the predictions came true. Now let us wait for the next jump to 24 Mbps...

300 posts and still at it -- revealing secrets :)

First, I would like to dedicate this 300th post since September, 2004 to my loyal readers who have tolerated obscenity, cynical humor, bizarre texts and weird tastes in music.
Then I would like to disclose that one of my favorite brands -- this is being written on an iMac G5, and when not, on a Powerbook G4 -- Apple, is finally getting an Apple Center in Riga on or around May 26. It is no big deal, around 60 or 70 m2 (not quite the Apple Store in San Francisco), but a first for Latvia. Franchised (?) to Capital.lv, the re-sellers who have been peddling Macs, MacBook Pros and iPods with paraphenelia at their store in the Riga shopping mall Alfa Centrs. Good luck.

And now the secret of the DaVinci code post: The company formerly known as Lattelekom's new corporate logo:
So there you have the snowboarding Siamese twins. Simple, wasn't it? The grey line on the right, BTW, is some kind of mistake in the upload.
lattelecom bought a huge, inane and totally wacko front page ad in my newspaper about some guy (a character borrowed from one of the Bite Toxic commercials, who is wondering about which way the wind is blowing in the beach resort town of Saulkrasti --Sunnyshores). What the fcuk does that have to with anything??? Having said that, as I see it, the corporate identity relaunch campaign can only go uphill from this..
Anyway, the repackaging is better than what happened in Estonia, where Eesti Telekom or Telefooni or whatever it was called has for a couple of years been called Elion. With absolutely no offense to any of my gay readers, for some reason, Elion sounds like the name of someone's gay Greek or Rumanian boyfriend. What it does not sound like is a telecoms company. although repeatedly shouting Elioni DigiTV on kohal! in a crowded Tallinn bus might get you some stares...
By the way, and no offense here too, homocritical (phobic would be fearful, one does not have to fear to, for ideological reasons, criticize homosexuality) blogging (in Latvian) colleague Kristaps, but the real gay Elion, should there be one, is welcome to the Riga Pride Parade in June, where, as in any democracy, harsh opinions against gayness may also be expressed. As a libertarian, I support the freedom of voluntary association of individuals, therefore also gay rights.
But let us move on to Lithuania, where Lietuvos Telekomas also recently changed its name to Teo. Teo? Indeed, Teo.. Teo sounds like some plain mousy but under it all very sexy heterosexual girl's tomcat. The girl in the linked page doesn't even have a cat! Girls, called by the then still acceptable term chicks back in the 60s, when I was in college in the US, had cats named Teo. To Latvian ears, Teo also makes me think of the sleazy hyperreligious Brother Theodore in the classic Latvian movie The Fisherman's Son. Teo...brālis Teodors...
So I think that lattelecom did the right thing. The company's half-mother TeliaSonera won't have to look up where her renamed daughter is...
As for what is strategically behind all this, that's already been on the blog, indeed, more is in the blog than you will see in the press. The newspaper has only a reporter, I as a blogger seem to have a fly on the wall in some interesting offices, so I am told :).
So, at three minutes past midnight, the totally tight embargo on lattelecom has ended and I press the publish button :)!

Blowback at last

Latvian blogger Kristaps Kaupe notes that the Latvian-language IT-related website and quasi-blog Datuve has translated and summarized my earlier post on 10 gigs across the Baltic. Finally, some blowback, which is not really the right word. Blowback is spook (read spy or intelligence agency) terminology for disinformation planted in the foreign press that somehow comes back into the mainstream media of the disinforming country :). It is like the CIA plants a story in the Moldovan press that an enemy of the US, Sheik Yerbooty of Wazoonistan gets it on with his sheep. That is meant to make Moldovans, who are looking for an alternative oil supply to, say, Russia, will avoid Wazoonistan because they are sensitive about human/sheep affection and actually believe that kind of weird shit. But there is, say, a Moldovan American stringer for the National Enquirer* who files a story saying that press reports claim Sheik Yerbooty does lambs (sheep pedofilia) and the New York Times at least notes that preposterous claims are circulating about someone already in disfavor with Washington, so blowback does have its benefits.
*a newspaper sold in lower-scale supermarkets with headlines like "Two-Headed Alien Crocodile Eats Baby Siamese Twins" and the like.
Anyway, I have discovered and tested the linking tool in Blogger that Kristaps Kaupe recently said he was surprised I wasn't using (well, not linking is what he meant).

Bite to launch HSDPA in September

Bite Latvija will launch HDSPA with stable download speeds of 2 Mbps in September, effectively postponing its planned launch of 3G services with slower date speeds originally scheduled for June.
This will be a flat fee service, probably comparable to what Bite charges in Lithuania for EDGE, which is around equivalent LVL 20, though no Latvian price has been set.
At the same time, the company will offer 22 channels of international and local mobile TV, presumably also viewable on laptops equipped with HSDPA cards. There will be a fixed premium fee for watching mobile TV. A collection of 300 000 songs will be available for download through the enhanced Bite Plus entertainment portal
The reason for the delayed launch is that Bite sees more of an opportunity in waiting and launching something that offers DSL comparable speeds for business and a high speed entertainment platform for the consumer market. In addition, Bite is counting on HSDPA phone /handset availability by September, so that there will be demand from the consumer side and, of course, the inevitable offering of cheap HSDPA phones at Bite outlets.

The Story of the Story

Exclusivity of news is like freshness in fish. It is governed by rules outside the control of the fisherman who catches it. To eat fresh fish, you gotta cook it fresh. I was given the Bite to launch HSDPA story on Friday. It did not go in Monday's paper. It will not be in Tuesday's paper. I don't know when it will be published. However, no one in the Latvian media seems to read this blog anymore, so maybe, by a process akin to mummification, the story will still be fresh looking when finally published.

An experimental opportunity lost :)

In a strange fit of sanity, the Latvian parliament, the Saeima, rejected a raving loonie crackpot scheme by the Green/ Farmers Alliance (ZZP) to ban all political "agitation" and advertising in most media 90 days ahead of the upcoming election. It opted, instead, for no restrictions and a system of spending limits on political parties (wildly honored in the breach* during the 2002 elections).
How does this relate to telecoms and IT? Well, had the ban actually been enacted, it would have been a wonderful stimulus to start an "offshore" internet-based political campaign with ads and programming running as video streams, internet radio, vlogs, blogs, podcasts and videopodcasts. In fact I (a total moron as far as hands-on website building) entertained the thought of urging the start of something like www.freelatvia.net (hosted outside the jurisdiction) as a political platform for any and all once the "green" blackout curtain was drawn on democratic political debate.
There could have been some great, bizarre videos of the Riga Municipal Police fining (who knows, maybe even arresting) politicians for talking to more than three people at once on the street. Agitation? Aha, grab that person!
Could it have been done had it been needed? I saw some interest for this idea from another blogger, Kristaps Kaupe, who runs a Latvian-language blog that is an odd mixture of extreme geek stuff on open source software, RSS feed-type and other meta-information linking technologies (tags, trackbacks and other weird sounding stuff) as well as somewhat fringe nationalist politics, opinions on music and a chronicle of the death of a mouse. Anyway, Kristaps (whose day job is in a small IT company) could have been a source of advice on how to set up and run this free-for-all, free-speech fundamentalist, basically anarchist (FCUK THE STATE!) project. These are not his politics, btw. Perhaps they are mine, but since this is a largely non-political blog, I just ask anyone interested to Google "libertarian" and judge for yourself...
While it could have been fun to show the big middle one to these idiots who want to curtail debate with a sledgehammer when other means of regulation make more sense, I am glad there is no need for this, and I hope there will be no next time around...
----
*honored in the breach means ignored and violated.

Now some musings to prove I am not insane..:)

As for the earlier post, time will tell.
Meanwhile, it seems that Kenneth Karlberg of TeliaSonera was in Riga to meet Minister of Economics Aigars Stokenbergs and to hear from the horse's mouth that there is no chance he will get Lattelekom, but to get Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT), both sides have to agree on a pricing/appraisal mechanism and then, of course, the price. The way things look, both sides will pick a kind of arbiter who will make an appraisal that will be binding to all (binding as a number, whether or not one wants to pay it is another issue). Nonetheless, it now looks like the government is serious about getting some kind of deal done in the next few months, perhaps even before more people representing the other end of the horse get elected to public office in the October parliamentary election.
That means, of course, that Lattelekom will soon be a stand-alone, state-owned fixed network operator. As I have written before, that doesn't look very good in today's telecoms world. However, there are some conditions and developments that may actually make this work. They are:

The Mobile Factor
Clearly Lattelekom will need a mobile component and, apparently, the company is working on several scenarios.
Plan A: Lattelekom, despite a change in owners, radically improves its operational/marketing cooperation with LMT. A precondition is that some people strolling to work down Ropažu Street (the LMT headquarters building is there, unless I am mistaken) about the street name) have a revelation and realize GSM IS DEAD!!(but, like any gut-shot elephant, still has to fall over). How is it dead? Well, think about HSDPA capable handsets on a flat-rate, always on internet connection and a SkypeOut capability built into the phone(that is the pre-paid, call most of the world's ordinary phones for 1.7 eurocents a minute service offered by Skype). LVL 0.012 per minute can't really be beaten, except by the price free, which also comes with the Skype when calling device-to-device. That is a price that in Latvia makes it just as cheap to call Australia (OK, I didn't check the Skype price list, but let's assume) as it is to call your neighbor on a Lattelekom phone. ).
And that is not the only threat to GSM. Think WIMAX. Think of other scenarios and you realize that it is better to have friends (Lattelekom) than to fade away alone.

Plan B: is where we start to get radical. Lattelekom could, under the right circumstances, buy the Bite Group if it were to come up for sale. That should give the combined company a strong mobile presence in Lithuania and a growing one in Latvia (also with a flock of MVNOs using and paying for the Bite network. Interest group oriented virtual operators are one way that mobile services can grow. Think again of a draugiem.lv /the 630 00 member social network/ mobile phone service since draugiem is one of the biggest flowers growing in a greenhouse where Lattelekom is the gardener). The purchase could be financed by credit and recovered when Lattelekom does an IPO at some point (with some of the funds going into the company rather than to the state directly).

Plan C: Even crazier, but assuming the "conventional" mobile phones are all going to get hit as phone-like, always on, flat rate mobile internet devices with Skype or SIP capability take over, why not? Under this plan, Lattelekom buys Triatel, the wireless internet and CDMA450 mobile phone operator. I mean, if you are going to cannibalize part of your own DSL customer base, do it with a potential velociraptor of a system such as the EV DO evolutions that will do several tens of megabits per second on the downlink, as Triatel has indicated they will do. Besides eating your own limbs, you will chomp on potential HSDPA users on speed (assuming that the average speed of HSDPA won't be much over 3 Mbps as some analysts forecast). Certainly Triatel will come cheaper than Bite.

The Media Scenario
While still remaining a content aggregator, Lattelekom develops its portal, Apollo, into an interactive news and entertainment platform with much user generated content, including the very new and burgeoning video collection on draugiem.lv (a kind of Latvian, perhaps soon Baltic YouTube). Dragging over the draugiem crowd, adding users/readers/viewers/listeners/comtributors/bloggers in all three Baltic States (or Tanzania for that matter..), Lattelekom becomes a medium that is as big as television in the region, and unlike television, available on demand and on any number of plaforms from 50 inch plasma HD screen to handheld to a live electronic ink tablet-like book/newspaper/magazine that is about to be invented at an affordable price.
In 2010, Lattelekom buys the flagship daily Diena and is the main plaform for interacting with a specialized business information environment formerly known as a paper I work for...

Pretending that I have smoked a bit too much of something, I will stop here. No music this time...

My DaVinci Code...:)

Who are the Siamese twin snowboarders? Answer late next week.

No, I am not crazy, just enignmatic.

10 Gigs across the Baltic

Lattelekom, which owns a majority share in a Baltic subsea optical cable (the minority owner is Sweden's Tele2) has just pumped up the bandwidth on this pipe to 10Gbps from an earlier 622Mbps. The company installed a repeaterless Siemens solution on the ca. 300 kilometer long link from Ventspils in Latvia to Nynäshamn in Sweden. The jazzed up fiber is expected to go commercial very soon, with Lattelekom convinced it will fill enough of the pipe to pay off some EUR 1 million spent on the upgrade.
One reason is that Lattelekom expects internet use and bandwidth consumption to rise with plans for boosting the last mile of its own Home DSL service to 10 Mbps in urban areas later this summer (probably). Add to that the rising mobile internet services and others (enterprises) using data transmission links, and you have the potential source for all that demand.
Meanwhile, Latvian cable TV/internet and fixed telco mogul Peteris Smidre's Baltcom Fiber plans to upgrade its current 2.5 Gbps to 2x2.5 Gbps, or a total of 5 Gbps (probably lighting up another pair). This link to Sweden via Gotland will also be repeaterless and cover around 103 km on the Latvian coastline to Gotland stretch (the other link is, I believe owned by Stokab of Sweden). Smidre, who started and later sold what is now the Tele2 mobile operator in Latvia (it was once Baltcom GSM), bought his 100 km of sophisticated fishing line (glass?) from a Dutchman who laid and buried it in the seabed and then was stuck holding the bag/roll or whatever because Foco 16, a rather dodgy "Powerpoint Company" put together by some Russian and Dutch entrepreneurs, fell apart and failed to pay. Smidre is said to have picked up the fiber link for a song (but the name was already taken :) ).
As things now stand, the price per Mbps is said to be reasonable and stable in this region, despite the more than tenfold jump in Lattelekom/Tele2's sub-Baltic capacity. There will apparently be enough demand to pay off the upgrade.

Music while this was written: Creedance Clearwater Revival, Mustang Sally, The Doors, Five to One, Jimi Hendrix, Lover Man, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mona, Rage Against The Machine, Kick Out The Jams (MC5 Cover), Lou Reed, Sweet Jane (one of a number of versions)

Fun to be virtual and take out that wrench?

Telekomunikāciju grupa (TG), the Latvian alternative operator, is planning to join the growing number of virtual mobile operators of one kind or another buzzing along on Bite Latvija's network. The regulator has issued them 50 000 numbers for this purpose.
TG largely serves a business clientele, so that their virtual service will probably be business-oriented and probably linked to the launch of Bite's long-awaited business class services such as HSDPA and flat-fee mobile internet.
Meanwhile, it seems that the government can instruct the state-owned Latvian State Radio and Television Center (LVRTC) to sell its 23% stakeholding in Latvian Mobile Telephone should that be needed to complete a deal with TeliaSonera (see earlier posts). That doesn't really make the possible Chinese firedrill of a deal any easier (49 % of Lattelekom minus 23% of LMT for 28 % of LMT plus just over 11.5 % of LMT, hold the other 49 % of 23 % of LMT that Telia Sonera indirectly holds through Lattelekom. Now repeat...). Oh yes, add cash. Lots.

Toss another wrench into Aigars S plans

The government's plans to nationalize Lattelekom and let TeliaSonera get 100 % of Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) have had a wrench tossed into the works by a Latvian appeals court. The court ruled that the 23 % stakeholding in LMT (plus another 5 % held by the Ministry of Transport) that Minister of Economics Aigars Stokenbergs says he could discuss trading for 49 % of Lattelekom, actually belongs to what is now a state joint stock corporation Latvian State Radio and Television Center (LVRTC in Latvian). The LVRTC when it was a state non-profit corporation owned the 23 % but transfered it to its subsidiary, the now moribund Digital Latvian Radio and Television Center (DLRTC). This entity was charged with implementing digital terrestrial television in Latvia, with the idea being that the enterprise would be financed by dividend revenue from the LMT stake.
As is well known in Latvia, the digital TV project was essentially killed by an overzealous anti-corruption government under Einars Repse in 2003, and some of its good faith participants who were, in fact, delivering what the DLRTC had been paying for, are still being hounded in the courts as if they were common criminals, fraudsters and lowlife.
At the same time as Hercules Repse pulled the digital temple of sin and fraud crashing down around him in ruins, a lawsuit was launched to recover the LMT stakeholding for the state. The LVRTC thought that, if anyone, it should be it that got back what it had (foolishly?) given to its wanton and promiscous daughter (who was soon to be broken on the wheel, anyway). Now, it seems, the LVRTC has won (and the DLRTC is being slowly and quietly broken on the wheel).
What this means for the whole Latvian telecoms nationalization/privatization deal is that the Swedes must now turn to the independent but state-owned LVRTC and see if it is willing to sell or swap its stake in LMT.
Just to set the record straight, Stokenbergs was a little miffed when my paper (not in my article but in a blurb of sorts) suggested that he had suggested to the Swedes that they swap Lattelekom holdings and cash for LMT. He says TeliaSonera had proposed the swap, minus the cash. However, government documents from a few years back suggest that the swap of Lattelekom for LMT was favored by the government at the time. Stokenbergs indicated one future option he was willing to discuss was stakeholdings and cash, but he had not put this on the table for the Swedes yet. OK, fine. Somehow I doubt that if the price of the remaining roughly 28 % of LMT is seen as more that 49 % of Lattelekom, the Min of Econ is going to ask for rubber duckies instead of large bags of euro or kronor or whatever. But now, that deal will have to be cut with the LVRTC. Next question to ask for my paper (which again grumbles, though mildly about my performance) is whether Ivars Golsts, the head of the LVRTC, is ready to do the deal and whether Aigars S has any say in what he decides.

Meanwhile, if you're wondering about terrestrial digital in Latvia, the answer is simple. Forget for the moment, the well-meant plans of the government to implement something in the next few years. Digital terrestrial TV in Latvia is fucked. Go buy a satellite dish or get cable...

Music played (on headphones) while writing this: Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers, The Who, My Generation, The Byrds, I Was So Much Younger, Tom Petty, Free Falling, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Two Trains Running and The Mommas & Pappas, California Dreamin'

The bees, the Lithuanian hare and the Latvian turtle?

TeliaSonera's regional honcho Kenneth Karlberg, not-quite-yet-not-really-totalled resigned to getting just Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) told me that ultimately, speed is what telecommunications is all about. A truism, considering that all telecom signals move at the speed of light, which is as fast as you can go in this universe, but something more when you talk about the actual speed of information, the throughput and bandwidth. In this respect, there is still a way to go before Einstein dances with Schrödinger's Cat (whatever that means), which is to say that bandwidth (and the content/experience to go with it) are the tools of competition. Karlberg is convinced that LMT can match other operators in speed even if TeliaSonera doesn't get 100 % ownership of fixed network operator Lattelekom. I think he was talking about two kinds of speed -- the speed of deployment, where wireless can beat wireline hands down (you can activate your 3G phone in a shop, but the Lattelekom installer still comes in a few days to install a wire phone and DSL) and the actual speed of the service. Here opinions vary. I am not sure we can blast gigabit metropolitan wireless without frying the crows as they fly by, but I may be wrong. Gigabit to the household by fiber is possible and said to be being done in Japan.
Anyway, even with no deal done on who ultimately owns Lattelekom and how soon the Swedes get all 100 % of LMT, one area where we don't see a race for speed is in deploying HSDPA, the fast mobile internet and data service that matches lower-end DSL speeds (around 3Mbps, some claim 14 Mbps). For one thing, there are no HSDPA phones on the market yet, though a number are coming in 2/2 2006. However, Estonian Mobile Telephone (EMT) has already launched its HSDPA service and Ominitel, a 100 % subsidiary of TeliaSonera, will launch a service in June. Both companies are aiming the HSDPA at business users and offering various laptop cards (which makes sense, considering the HSDPA at its best can be a city-wide and mobile DSL substitute).
LMT at best will do some technical tests or pilot schemes with HSDPA this year, taking the cautious route. It hopes to be the winning turtle (I can't spell tortoise) among the Baltic hares. However, according to my sources, it will be soundly beaten by the Latvian bee (Bite Latvija). I predict the bee will buzz something about HSDPA over the next few days. Watch this space.

More on the no sale of Lattelekom

This is what I believe the present Latvian government intends to happen if the government's plans to sell only Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) to Sweden's TeliaSonera are implemented.
Lattelekom, Latvia's fixed network operator, is going to be an arms-length, state-owned company for a few years, probably starting its own mobile operator before being prepared for an IPO on one of the bigger regional (Nordic) or European stock exchanges. The state will probably keep a small share when that happens to get a revenue stream from what Minister of Economics Aigars Stokenbergs believes will be a stronger, more diversified and profitable Lattelekom.
Lattelekom will become a small to medium-sized regional competitor to its former half-mother in some niches (such as data communications) a provider of services that TeliaSonera doesn't offer (business process outsourcing, even with TeliaSonera as a potential customer) and a player in entirely new services such as intelligent, application-aware networks (with some help from MicroLink, the IT integrator that it recently acquired).
What the latter means is that the fixed network operator will offer a new, very sophisticated VPN layer when it connects the network to certain business customers. In other words, it will attach the corporate users to, say their Oracle or SAP application suite and have the network recognize and route. say, all their order messages and other related data traffic in a particular manner. It could even error check and, say, bounce back an order with an improperly entered number or whatever.
Such a network could also, at the VPN (maybe I am getting this wrong) layer, handle and prioritize content and services from a content provider, interact with CRM, etc. This is all from Cisco honcho Kaan Terzioglu's recent presentation. So that means that Lattelekom in Latvia and regionally could provide the backbone and hosting for this kind of stuff, grabbing up enterprise customers almost end to end, in fact, installing customized intelligent network based applications instead of just running a phone, ISDN or internet line to the enterprise. And here lies, perhaps, a threat to TeliaSonera...
Some of my sources say that Lattelekom chafed a bit under the half-mother, saying she was a little slow and conservative. In fact, some Lattelekom execs had mixed-feelings about being wholly owned by the Swedes, or at least they saw a certain downside.
This is not to say that Lattelekom going it alone as a state-owned company is all roses. When I mentioned this to my colleagues at my sometimes maligned (in this blog) paper, there was derisive laughter. They are pretty sure that once the state gets 100 % of Lattelekom, politicians will, to put it bluntly, fuck up the company. There is some truth to this, or rather, much truth. The Minister of Economics isn't really a politician, more of a technocrat and one of the few politics-connected people in Latvia who passes my "Alfred E. Newman" test (Newman is that wacko looking guy in the American Mad Magazine, who has a caption under him Not Insane).
Minister Stokenbergs has, for Latvia, some pretty sane (therefore unacceptable or at least strange on an interplanetary level to the rest of the loonies in politics) ideas, such as 1) letting Lattelekom do its business 2) changing laws so that, for example, management can get performance-based incentives, including options ahead of or after the IPO, etc.
On the downside, Lattelekom could lose the economies of scale that it enjoyed co-purchasing equipment and services with TeliaSonera, though I am not sure how much of that has been going on. At the end of the day, the Swedes may even come to an independent Lattelekom to get things done -- like some of their billing, books, network management, whatever can be done remotely over the network from the Baltics.
There is also the issue of whether Lattelekom can successfully start a fifth mobile operator in our land of 2.2 million (and falling) souls. Here the weird idea of buying Bite creeps in, but that is perhaps because I am sipping whiskey in the middle of the night on Latvia's Independence 2.0 Day. I suspect Bite could be an expensive proposition, especially if Lattelekom has to go against, say, Elisa in Finland. But at least Bite would give Lattelekom a foothold of some, say., 100 000 mobile customers in Latvia and much more if the Lithuanian bee is also bought.
This is descending into rambling hallucinations.

Music played while writing: Rage Against the Machine, Maggie's Farm, U2, Vertigo, Rolling Stones, Brown Sugar, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Let It Ride, Grateful Dead, Sunshine Daydream (a download described as Fucking Awesome, but having no good grass/or any grass in the house, I can't say.. :) :). Oh yes, and Jimi Hendrix (Live at Winterland), Sunshine of Your Love, instrumental, definitely in the Fuckin' Awesome category by me...

Minister says definite "no" to Lattelekom sale

Latvia's Minister of Economics Aigars Stokenbergs said "a crystal clear no" to selling 100 % of the fixed network operator Lattelekom to Sweden's TeliaSonera but said negotiations would continue on the Swedish company's offer to buy 100 % of mobile operator Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT).
It was the first clear rejection of part of TeliaSonera's offer, told to this blogger. Stokenbergs said the main reason for rejecting the Swedish offer was not concern about market dominance voiced earlier by some government officials and analysts, but rather that Lattelekom could pursue a more independent business development strategy even if 100 % owned by the state. At some future date, the government would probably opt for an IPO of Lattelekom on one of the region's or Europe's larger stock exchanges.
More later...

F**K IT!!! (perhaps)

This is not so much about telecoms as it is about telecoms journalism. Last week, I got my good sources to give most of the details of the Lattelekom-Triatel deal to finish modernizing the fixed voice network using fixed wireless CDMA technology. I explained how Lattelekom would be buying the CDMA radio units, how most customers getting this modernization would continue to use their old fixed handsets, how a 100 kbps internet link would be possible for some, with high speed internet possible later and in some areas (likely at additional cost). I suspect I pretty much got most of the story ahead of anyone else and I submitted a good curtain raiser/exclusive. The newspaper shitcanned it. An exclusive, though not earthshaking story. So fuck them.
This blog is become more and more important for getting across what I know, both from attributable sources and well...others.

A later note
Just adding this note today, May 3, that I checked only the internet version of the paper last night when I first wrote this rant. It should contain the entire print edition text, but sometimes it doesn't.
The person who was news editor is relatively new to her job and, like many, clueless about telecoms stories or technology more complicated than a ball-point pen. So I am off to work to see whether the story was really canned in print as well.
The worst of it is that I spend time and effort at the editor's behest to add some comment from the side, a technique that is sometimes interesting and illustrates the impact of the story on someone the reader can identify with, other times, it is just following mindless routine. It was a bit more of the latter, as when we first revealed the Lattelekom-Triatel relationship we already quoted the managing director of the Latvian Telecommunications Association as saying this was a good thing. But I tracked down one contact (in Philadelphia) who is a businessman with a country house in some hell by the cartwheel place (for middle of f**king nowhere, Latvians say ellē ratā which really doesn't translate..:) ) and got his views, plus a short list of customers from Lattelekom who had CDMA fixed phones installed. As it is, a fucking waste of time, unless the print paper used it...
I don't have enough contacts at the local mental hospitals to find someone to say that modernizing telecommunications with wireless technologies was BAD because more demons would come to his/her head over the Satanic frequencies used by the great Satan Lattelekom. So I did my best...

Lattelekom's broadband game plan

Lattelekom has the biggest potential broadband customer base (a fair chunk of its 600 000 fixed network users) but is falling behind in the high-speed bells and whistles that some other providers can offer. Balticom, for instance, offers 10 Mbps in some Riga suburbs and a few downtown locations.
The biggest threat to Lattelekom is in the new/renovated housing market, where the inhabitants are likely to have the necessary discretionary income to buy high speed services and premium content (such as HDTV over the internet, when it become available). Here Latvenergo, the state owned energy utility and its subunit, Latvenergo Telecommunications, are putting in fiber to the home with speeds of up to 100 Mbps. While I am not sure just what you can do with 100 Mbps (show me the servers that can unload multiple streams of content at those speeds), Latvenergo has the advantage of putting in this service pretty much wherever new electricity connections are made. It has already run fiber to the residence in some multi-dwelling buildings and will soon be doing a single family home development of a number of homes.
My sources say Lattelekom has a plan to put up to 24 Mbps DSL in many Riga homes. In a major upgrade of its fiber optic network in most of Riga, the incumbent will install fiber to the curb units attached to mini-DSLAMs in local boxes that will deliver very fast DSL to an entire block of homes and businesses. This will involve replacing existing switchboxes with newer models that have back up and main power supplies, since the DSLAMs apparently need to be seperately powered. In other words, a bit of digging and installation.
Before that, you will probably see Lattelekom speeding up its existing DSL connections from the present 1 Mbps (pay LVL. 1.99 per month extra) to something like 10 Mbps just to keep up with the likes of Balticom and to at least match what Latvenergo will offer in its basic fiber to the home package.