Desperate mapmakers and lucky outsourcers

I should pay a bit of attention to the IT side on this blog. Jana Seta, a Latvian publisher of print and digital maps, has repeatedly called me with a lamentation that 85 % of their digital product has been stolen and copied. Welcome to the real world...
However, the problem is that the editors of a certain paper don't think that the story is worth publishing (if 85 % of the warehouse of, say a major home electronics company were carted off during the night, it would be another story). One argument is the belief that Jana Seta used old Soviet maps (USSR state property?) to make its digital maps (GIS systems, really) , therefore it is more OK to steal from them than if they had made the maps from scratch (just imagine what doing original satellite photography and aerial surveillance would do to costs...).
Whatever the reason, the story of the pillage of Jana Seta by various cyberpirates (including those who put the maps on their websites for commercial purposes, i.e. how to find our office, etc.) isn't going to get told, except here. So now some justice is done..
Another story that I think is in a holding pattern for the trash/underplayed bin is that TeliaSonera has selected Latvia Dati Exigen as one of its 14 suppliers of IT services over the next two years. TeliaSonera has cut the number of suppliers from 29 and Dati Exigen is the first East European country to be selected. This is a signal that, despite having such luminaries and giants as Accenture and TietoEnator among the 14, TeliaSonera is slowly shifting its IT operations to the somewhat cheaper, high quality, high efficiency Baltic nearshore. This has already caused some alarm on the Scandinavian IT services market, I am told. Unfortunately, TeliaSonera doesn't disclose its specific IT spending, but it appears that the Dati Exigen share of it will be a substantial single figure millions of USD sum, and will push the capacity of the Latvian company (with headquarters in San Francisco) to the maximum. As many as 100 people may be needed to do the work for the Swedes.

Jesper goes Swiss, Dutchman to fly in

Jesper Thiell Eriksen, the head of Bite Group and a trusted but sometimes unshakeable source for this blogger/journalist, has been reassigned by his parent company TDC to head TDC Switzerland. He will be replaced by Maarten van Engeland, a Dutchman who comes from an executive vice-presidency at TDC Solutions, a part of TDC's fixed line operations.
As far as I can determine, there is nothing particular behind these fast and unexpected changes, it is simply TDC's style to move their managers around like they were airborne Rangers, in, do the mission and out before anyone realized what was happening. Meanwhile the private equity consortium that formed Nordic Telephone Company (NTC) has announced it has just over 88 % of the shares in TDC and will give precise figures on January 25. We may then also learn more about what they intend to do with their new asset.

Not news, not yet...

I discovered Wednesday (January 18) that my paper had not published the story that Lattelekom was going to offer 10 Mbps DSL internet at some point in the first half of 2006.
The story needed a slight re-write, placing less emphasis on "the Great Satan" Lattelekom, although, like them or not, the dominant actors do set the national benchmark. So to my mind, if Lattelekom does it, for better or worse, it is/will be done. Baltkom, at best, has around 9000 fixed internet connections, best top speed 2 Mbps, only in certain parts of Riga. IZZI probably has somewhat fewer connections, again in restricted parts of Riga. Lattelekom has around 57 000 household DSL subscribers, which is a bit more and they are in different parts of the country, though presumably, mainly in Riga.
I did find that a company called Balticoms, which operates in the Riga suburbs, does offer pretty genuine looking 10 Mbps international traffic internet for around LVL 16.50 per month (it says it has its own 300 Mbps international channel, not bad).
Anyway, the story didn't run, it was here only on the blog, but no one in the Latvian media picked it up!
Ever since a certain journalist left the news agency LETA and another one from BNS joined a certain paper, nobody watches the blog and now they have missed a perfect episode of what could have been unintended blowback (when you let others beat you with your own story :) as carried by some other media ). I was sure my story would run, so I blogged what was pretty much an exclusive on Lattelekom and when it didn't make the paper, I was sure someone would pick it up...
Oh yes, and nobody in the Latvian blogosphere noticed either, not even Kristaps Kaupe, whose company I actually called for comment (they are a small IT outfit providing internet at 512 Kbps international traffic, much faster domestic in an area covered by one big spool of Ethernet cable around their office in downtown Riga)
Well, I now feel safer about publishing whatever I know and whatever comes to mind here, no risk of compromising exclusivity for my paper ...:)

Look for 10 Mbps Lattelekom DSL by this summer

Lattelekom will upgrade its consumer DSL services to offer download speeds of 10 Mbps or more by this summer, company officials told this blogger (Latvian readers, see www.db.lv or the January 18 newspaper). The reason is increasing competition from alternative and small operators already claiming to offer higher speeds (though most often only within the Latvian network).
The high-speed service will most likely come only at a small premium to the present 512 Kbps HomeDSL service, which costs around LVL 15 per month.
Lattelekom is facing competitive pressure not only from other fixed network providers, but from the prospect of mobile operator Bite Latvija offering fixed-fee mobile internet with mult-megabit speeds on the UMTS network, using HSDPA technology.
Business DSL services will also see much higher speeds but will also be priced, as now, substantially higher in line with service levels.
A Swedish survey by analysts Berg Insight of Gothenburg says that in the next few years there may be as many as 50 million HSDPA users in Europe who surf the internet anywhere (within 3G coverage) for a flat fee and at speeds of 3.6 Mbps or higher.
In the new housing projects (apartment buildings and individual home villages), both Lattelekom and Latvenergo, the national energy utility, are offering fiber-to-the-home solutions that will enable speeds of up to 100 Mbps to individual subscribers and "gigabit" speeds to the local router.

Bite bites the wired internet market in the...

Bite Latvija's announcement that it will be launching UMTS using the state-of-the-art fastest HSDPA technology for data transmission has had a interesting knock-on effect on the wired internet connection market. Lattelekom is now saying it will roll out ultra-fast DSL (in the 10 Mbps to 10 Mbps) range later this year. However, they say this is inevitable even without Bite because there are some 200 competitors in Riga offering a variety of alternative connection speeds and prices. However, most of these are localized "Sharashkin's Offices" (an expression in Latvian derived from a Russian expression meaning a small, fly-by-night or perhaps, fly-by-twilight operation), whereas Bite's HSDPA coverage will attempt to be uniform for the whole city and several other Latvian towns, as well. With unlimited mobile internet costing the equivalent of LVL 20 per month on Bite's business-class service (business services will also be launched around the time Bite goes 3G), many people will be able to use the internet through their mobile phone at a speed several times higher than the 521 Kbps of Lattelekom's HomeDSL (2 Mbps for services in their "open garden"). HSDPA (did I spell that right :) ?) is supposed to deliver very high speeds, over 8 Mbps, perhaps even 20 Mbps, but that is in the laboratory, not in practice. But even 3 to 4 Mbps over a mobile link, anywhere, anytime (well, in Riga) for LVL 20 flat is a pretty good deal and it outruns even Triatel's nomadic 1 Mbps (perhaps 2.4 Mbps) service, that costs a little over LVL 25 monthly, plus the cost of a seperate wireless modem. With HSDPA, that comes with the 3G phone.
Generally, however, Bite doesn't expect 3G to take off in Latvia until 2010, when it will have 20 % penetration, and go mass market (over 50 %) in 2012.
Apparently Bite is counting on 3G to be a "force multiplier" for its business package, also due out in the first half of 2006. The business class service will offer, as it does in Lithuania, a privileged roaming service with Vodafone, basically offering one tariff for calls in most of Europe and an automatic link to Vodafone or a Vodafone partner whereever one is (no more making that first call from the airport with a superexpensive service that has a powerful base station just outside the terminal.)

Google fuckwits at it again!!/Lattelekom IPTV looks OK

Google says the Latvian Telecoms Vlog video is live and available. They could have watched King Kong (3 hours) 12 or 15 times in the time they took to verify it. But when I look up my video on video.google.com (search under Latvian), it says that it is not available for viewing. It just goes to show that whatever is free is often garbage. Perhaps Lattelekom will launch its video archive service soon and one will be able to put the occasional video blog on it.
I borrowed my youngest son's Packard-Bell Wintel laptop and found that Lattelekom's IPTV worked rather well (it doesn't work on the iMac G5). I put the LNT broadcast of the movie Air America on full screen, and it looked about like a DVD played on the computer would look. So, I give them a good mark for effort and await:

a) that it works for Macintosh
b) that we get some foreign, non-Russian channels, like CNN and BBC World.

Vlogging on Google Video is a disaster

It now seems that it takes more than 24 hours for Google Video to "verify" that a less than two minute video of my "talking head" (in English, not Latvian) is not offensive or pornographic. Since blogging is a form of news reporting, this is unacceptable. I will look for some other hosting solution, though it doesn't look promising. There is some tutorial on how to put video on blogger.com hosted blogs, but I tried that and ended up in a loop -- to put the video on some public archive, I had to log into some other site, which then asked that I be authorized on the first site-- you get the picture.
I am thinking of doing 30 seconds of video simply chanting "Google, maukas!" :) :) so their verifiers can determine that I am saying how tasty they are in Finnish. Latvians may find this both funny and offensive, but tell me, who hasn't brought one of those cartons of flat bread back to the office from Helsinki?
For the non-Latvian speaking:

maukas = cheap whores (Latvian)
maukas = delicious (Finnish, also a brand of flat bread with a big logo MAUKAS covering the whole carton :) :) )

Master Telecom to become a postpaid operator

Master Telecom, hitherto an "alternative" fixed network voice services provider, intends to become a mobile operator offering postpaid GSM services. It will invest considerably in infrastructure short of its own base stations (switches, billing and customer service systems will be owned and operated by Master Telecom). The network capacity is being negotiated with an undisclosed operator. Bite Latvija, mentioned in some press reports, has denied that there have been any talks. However, it is a common practice for all operators involved in such negotiations to agree to confidentiality.
Master Telecom intends, starting in February or March, to become the first operator in Latvia to offer both mobile and "true" fixed line services. Triatel already offers "telecoms in a box" based on its wireless cdma 450 solution which offers mobile phones, fixed wireless desktop phones, and EVO standard high speed wireless internet modems.
Your blogger learned about Master Telecoms plans in an extensive background briefing by Master Telecom's top management.
There may be some interesting developments with Master Telecom in a distant, large country by the summer. Master Telecom is the company mentioned in my somewhat ironic earlier post on a possible cdma operator. They didn't get the 800 Mhz frequencies they applied for, and they are still rather secretive (as far as publishing, because of ongoing finalization of certainb agreements) about their detailed plans. These will be revealed at the end of January. So place your guesses and bets, but if its on the Latvian honey-maker that sounds in English like what dogs do, the odds aren't there for a big win. Read between the lines...

Yet another Vlog

I bought a webcam in Stockholm so I don't have to screw around with my DV video camera every time I want to experiment with vlogging. I have put up another vlog on google.video.com for what it is worth, yet another test. It should be live in several hours. They are slow in verifying stuff at google. No way yet to link it directly to the blog or to insert the movie in the blog using blogger.
I also hope to try cam chatting, probably with my oldest son in Umeå, Sweden, whose girlfriend may have gotten a webcam for Christmas. So if there are any serious cam chatters out there, it might be interesting.

A year-end wrap and look ahead

I’m in Stockholm over New Year’s and have just a dial-up connection, so I’m writing this offline and hope I can manage to post it.
The year’s major events, to my mind, have been the arrival of Bite to spur competition in the mobile market as well as the emergence of Triatel as a viable alternative offering “telecoms in a box” and the first real 3G services in Latvia.
A couple of non-events: the government has not made up its mind whether to sell Lattelekom to its half-mother, TeliaSonera. At year end, it still looked ready to offer the fixed line operator, alone, to ABTS (anyone but TeliaSonera).
At Lattelekom, the non-event of the year has been IPTV, which we will see before Easter, but which has been promised us since last summer (when it was supposed to be launched in the fall). All one can say is SISFU (something is seriously fucked up), and perhaps I will find out when back in Latvia next week.
The pseudo-event of the year was IZZI saying that it was launching IPTV that looked exactly like its digital cable TV offering. It turns out that you can get IZZI digital over the internet if you a) have a 5 Mbps connection and b) rent or buy their decoder.
Since it doesn’t look like HomeDSL is going to jump to 5 Mbps before the end of 2006, why not just get their digital cable, which is reasonably priced and packaged, and why make a balagāns (a cheapo show) of pretending to have IPTV?
To be fair, this is a product one can offer for resale by other ISPs. We will see if that flies.
On December 1, number portability was introduced, but there was no stampede to switch. Bite had more than 50 000 users by year end, and perhaps just over 500 were switchers.
On the fixed side, a War of the Gagoons (Gāganu karš, colorful Latvian expression for much ado about nothing much) erupted between Baltkom and Lattelekom over number portability charges.
My analysis: yes, Lattelekom is probably overdoing it with their starting offer fees (they finally caved in to sharply lower interconnect fees ordered by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission in 2004, it was not the end of the world); no, there will not be a stampede of thousands to Baltkom, rather, many hundreds who want their digital triple play – internet, TV and voice.
Fixed line is not where the action is. For international calls, you can get everything from Skype (free), Skype Out (cheap), various cheapo internet phone services and cards, and some pretty good tariffs from the bigger companies, including Lattelekom, if you pick the right tariff plan.

Looking to 2006

I predict:
Lattelekom will finally launch IPTV before Easter. Most people will shrug and say: „interesting“. If I were writing this in the evening on my HomeDSL line, maybe I could open a window and watch Panorama while typing (by year end 2006, maybe even watch BBC World).
Bite will get over 100 000 users, maybe more, by the end of Q2 2006.
Bite may launch flat fee business services by end Q2.

With a parliamentary general election in 2006, it is unlikely that the issue of privatizing Lattelekom and Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) will be settled. Maybe in 2007. Trust any Latvian government to a) procrastinate (drag its feet) and b) probably fuck it up, selling Lattelekom at a firesale to TDC, Telefonica or Telenor (these are near-hallucinatory guesses). TeliaSonera will get all of LMT before Kenneth Karlberg retires, in any case. Kenneth is a man in his prime ☺.

Someone will launch WiMax by the summer, at least in Riga.
Triatel will get several thousand small business/upscale household customers in the Riga suburbs and in some country towns. It will have to look seriously at 3G services (content, a portal, etc.) in addition to actually having the network running.

We will have another internet speed race during the year. 1 Mbps will be the standard home connection by year-end. In Riga, there will be premium home services that offer 8 Mbps, perhaps even 24 Mbps (as in Sweden).

The first cdma450/GSM hybrid phones may appear, an opportunity for Triatel, and a challenge/opportunity for the GSM operators. The first mid-priced GSM/WiFi handsets will also appear, challenging the GSM operators to offer some kind of home cell discount. After all, from my apartment, I can Skype the world through my home WiFi from a hybrid phone. There are also hundreds of public and private hotspots in downtown Riga, so GSM operators will have a problem.

Happy holidays to all!

Well, this is just to wish a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah (perhaps past already, despite going to my American high school with many Jews, I hereby flunk Basic Jewish Facts for the Goy 101 :( ), joyous Kwanzaa, Priecīgus saulgriežus (the Latvian pagan solstice, also past) and whatever else may be being celebrated at this otherwise dark and dreary time of year, except in Australia (where this site gets hits from, too :) ).

Your faithful but seasonal holiday-challenged blogger,

Juris Kaža

Another cdma operator??

I was asked not to write about this, so I am not telling you that a company that was awarded 20 000 mobile numbers, and, hitherto, has offered only fixed-line services (as an alternative operator), is not saying whether it will launch a cdma service, using the the cdma 450 and 800 spectrum. This unnamed company (the name is in the Latvian Public Utility Regulation Commission's announcement on number resource allocations on Dec 16) is not saying that it is not doing a virtual operator deal with, say, the most obvious – Bite. Instead, it is not hinting that it may launch a service in direct competition with Triatel. The truth will be known in the second half of January, the company didn't say.


:) :) :)

Izzi or Izzn't it IPTV??

I missed the Izzi dog and pony show with IPTV, but looking at the PowerPoint they sent me, it looks like it is their digital cable TV (same package, same price). So what is the story – IPTV is what I get when subscribe to this on top of their cable internet ( 1Mps for LVL 19.95 is not so bad, but then, LVL 4.00 plus LVL 1.50 for each packet of several programs plus the decoder to purchase or rent and it gets pricey). Izzi digital cable TV comes without the cable internet, or rather, the cable comes without the internet, but the product is the same.
So I don't really get this? Or does getting it matter? We are in the age of one plug in the wall, many services, no need to know (other than curiousity, bad for cats) where they come from and how they come. Everything is a feature of an always on digital pipe. Call it what you want.
With pretty pictures of a set-top decoder box in the Izzi PPS, it doesn't look like something you will be able to watch on a PC (or Mac, in my case). The Lattelekom IPTV deal, which looks like it will appear in Q1 2006, will be available on PCs first (and may not fully work on Macs, my inside sources tell me). They will go for the set top box sometime in Q3 2006, assuming there are no delays or additional f**kups.
It remains to be seen whether Izzi gets an unbeatable first mover advantage. Will it cannibalize its digital cable with IPTV? Not if the eaten and the eater are the same thing, as they appear to be. What I think the Izzi digital cable offering has going for it is that it is focussed and gives defined packages of programs, with the basic one going for LVL 4.00 a month (cheaper than Baltcom). Baltcom's digital selection is around 100 channels, including lots of weirdo stuff, Korean satellite TV, etc. And how many German channels showing dubbed American films with black policemen shouting "Hände hoch motherfucker" can you stand? As far as the ethnic Russian target audience, when you are paying around LVL 11 a month for those 100 channels, everyone will be fighting babushka to watch Eurosport or MTV (which I think has a Russian channel) instead of nostalgic Soviet movies.
It's gonna be a weird year...

The Vlog is live

My second Vlog attempt in English has gone live on video.google.com for those interested. I am not sure how you make a direct link. Google-owned Blogger certainly doesn't make it easy, probably not even possible. So do check it out, there isn't all that much stuff that searching under Latvia will get you on Google Video.

Re: The Vlog

It is taking Google Video all of a day to "verify" my submission. This is pretty amazing, considering the incredible, bizarre shit that you find on this site. All I have is a talking head, for f**k's sake! I wonder who let past (it was actually funny, I will admit) an episode of what could politely be called "ignition of intestinal gasses". There are clips where people blow up small dead reptiles (or whateverthef**k toads are) with firecrackers. I think they even blasted a dead rabbit. There are actual battle scenes from Iraq with people screaming obscenities, gunfire and explosions. There are amateur rock videos with someone else's music. They used to call that plagiarism. From Latvia, I have seen a weird clip about traffic safety from the 1930s and a fascinating "art of the banal" clip of riding a bus across the suspension bridge in Riga.
So what the f**k is taking Google so long?
Sorry, end of the day. one needs to rant.

IZZI beats Lattelekom on IPTV

Izzi, the company formerly known as TeliaMultiCom, has invited journalists to a demo of its IPTV service on December 15. I don't know if I will attend. Unfortunately, my late uncle's second wife, a retired lecturer in economics at the University of Latvia, died last week and her funeral will be held tommorrow afternoon. As the only representative of the family (my parents live in the US) in these parts, I will be paying my respects.
In any case, it will be interesting to test the Izzi service, assuming it can be accessed from Lattelekom's HomeDSL. It also remains to be seen how much of a first mover advantage Izzi will get from this, and how much it will cannibalize Izzi's digital cable TV service, which it is also launching.

Second video blog in English

Well, I just uploaded my second attempt at a video blog. It started as an attempt to do a one-way video chat with my oldest son in Umeå, Sweden, who has an identical computer to mine (an iMac G5) but no camera yet. So with the camera connected (and, yes, the fan hissing and all that shit in the background, plus it being nearly 2 am, the wee hour of the weird night) I did something. It is called Latvian Telecoms Vlog2 and you can find it at video.google.com as soon as it is approved and put up. This is still an experiment. Someday, I will take the camera into the field, maybe interview someone, edit it, etc. etc.
Maybe something when I am in Sweden after Christmas?

Lattelekom slips back into retailing

Lattelekom opened the first of what will apparently be several Apollo «digital gadget and services» boutiques at a Riga shopping center. The idea is to sell desktop PCs, SOHO (small office, home office) equipment such as copiers, faxes, scanners and printers, wireline phone handsets, digital cameras and various things for the gadgeterati, as well as subscriptions to phone lines and DSL internet.

Where have we seen this before?
A year ago, Lattelekom' s then one and only subsidiary Sakaru Sistemas sold its 11 TeleParks retail shops to mobile phone dealer DT Mobile. DT Mobile owns the Dual and Trodeks chains of mobile phone shops, and it is converting the former TeleParks shops to Trodeks IT (or something like that).

What is missing here?
Well, whatever you may be able to buy at the Apollo store, it probably won't be a mobile phone and subscription (or prepaid). I may be wrong, I haven't been to the place, but there is only one dealer where you can get what small businesses really want, which is "telecoms in a box" and that is Triatel. It is, even with desktop phones, a totally wireless solution, so some business might be wary of that. But it does give a signal to Lattelekom (and Latvian Mobile Telephone) to get their act together.
Still, smart and logical as it may be, it isn't likely. My sources tell me that people at LMT are convinced that they and only they will be put up for full adoption by the half-mother, TeliaSonera, and that the half mother will orphan Lattelekom, to be sold on the cheap to whomever.
Back in Sweden, there are press stories that the half-mother has been consorting with Russia's Alfa Group, which has substantial telecoms interests and may be seeking to make peace and establish cooperation after participating in a perejoba (excuse my poor Russian, but the idea is along the lines of a f**king over) of TeliaSonera in its futile efforts to by all of Turkcell, a Turkish mobile operator.

Major failure of Lattelekom DSL network??

There seems to have been a major collapse of Lattelekom's DSL network the night from Thursday to Friday. I write via Bluetooth and my GPRS Nokia phone. The help line for DSL was overwhelmed, then had a recording saying in more polite terms that everything was clusterf**ked. It still has not been restored. A disaster. How big and long, we shall know tommorrow. Good to have a back-up via mobile. One more reason to get an EDGE phone.

More pleas from the half-mother

Kenneth Karlberg, head honcho for Baltics, Denmark and Norway of TeliaSonera, told a press conference that it was now or never for selling the state participations in Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) and Lattelekom. In case you are wondering, " never " is between six months and a year, when the Swedish telecoms group would like to finish some kind of deal with the Latvian government.
Karlberg and Erik Hallberg, an even bigger TeliaSonera honcho and member of Lattelekom's board (?) along with press flack (in a good sense) Kjell Lindström met with the troika appointed by the government to deal with the question of privatization of both partly state-owned Latvian operators. These were Minister of Economics Krisjanis Karins (sometimes referred to as "the widow's son), Minister of Transport Ainars Slesers and Minster of Finance Oskars Spurdzins.
Karlberg said the meeting had been "positive" and discussions would continue. There were no concrete results. He said he hoped the talks would be concluded in six months to a year with some kind of result.
The troika has been dealing with the question since last summer and had its mandate extended in the fall. According to my sources, one of the thornier issues is "legal matters that are not clear". What this seems to hint at is that the government is still sticking to the view that Lattelekom should be sold to anyone but TeliaSonera, therefore, a way of getting around TeliaSonera's right of first refusal has to be found.
However, reading between the lines of Karlberg's statement, it appears that the government may be open to arguments that, perhaps, selling Lattelekom as a stand-alone wireline operator may not be the smartest thing and that ownership of both fixed and mobile won't diminish competition in Latvia, but will increase it, as is the case, Karlberg said, in Lithuania and Estonia.
Another of my sources indicated that at the upper levels of LMT, there appears to be a belief that they will be the only maiden to marry the Swedish prince (women at a certain newspaper have made remarks that Karlberg is "quite handsome"). Hence LMT brushed off an offer to cooperate with a daughter of the sister they believe will be left behind. Of course, Juris Binde, the father of the proud "first bride" could be proven wrong.
Karlberg also spend considerable time describing the mating frenzy that has taken place in European telecoms (reminds me of the frog orgy near my summer house, everyone hopping on top of everyone else). TeliaSonera, he pointed out, has been mating with every available froggy in the Baltic pond and is now the number one bullfrog in most of the region's markets, and rich to boot. But where there are fat bullfrogs, there could be swooping Spanish storks or giant German turtles. We shall see.