Baltkom, the cable TV and telephony company that launched, developed and sold the Latvian mobile operator now known as Tele2, will re-enter the mobile market with a soft launch of its virtual services on the Bite network during the fall.
Tariffs on the new service will closely match those offered by Bite and will include mobile internet (HSDPA), which the Bite network offers in Riga and several other Latvian cities.
The new service, which will be part of a Quattro package (cable TV, cable internet, fixed and mobile telephone) or sold seperately, will start without any fanfare, probably as an offer to existing Baltkom customers (there are more the 170 000 cable TV subscribers). Once the services are accepted and proven to work for existing customers, a wider marketing campaign and announcement will be made.
This, according to my source.
Showing posts with label Baltcom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baltcom. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Baltcom's Pēteris tosses a little wrench into the works
Pēteris Šmidre, in his capacity as board chairman of Alīna, the holding company that owns the Baltcom electronic communications group (internet, cable/digital TV and fixed telecoms), has tossed a wrench into the works of plans for a management/staff buyout of Lattelecom.
Alīna has sent a letter to the Latvian government expressing interest in acquiring a piece of Lattelecom. One reason, according to the news agency LETA, is that Lattelecom should be held to its committment to provide services to unprofitable customers. Otherwise, there are few details as to what Alīna would do as an investor in Lattelecom. Certainly, it is doubtful that Šmidre could buy the whole company (at LVL 290 million if its 23 % share in Latvian Mobile Telephone/LMT is discounted, otherwise LVL 450 million) alone, and saying that you are buying a company that you intend to force into unprofitable businesses is not the best way to get co-investors.
But that is not the problem. Pēteris is pounding on an open door on this issue, since the Latvian regulatory authority has always insisted that Lattelecom, as a market dominant operator, has a duty to provide universal service. Currently a government working group is studying how to fund universal service provision and who should be eligible. Raimonds Bergmanis, the head of the Communications Department of the Ministry of Transport, is inclined to favor a system of open regional tenders for utilizing the fund, that is, allowing all service providers to bid for providing subsidized universal service. More likely than not, the fastest and cheapest solution will be wireless. So Lattelecom is unlikely to be deeply involved in any of this.
So why all this? One simple theory is the bad blood between Baltcom and Lattelecom. Šmidre has always maintained that Lattelecom did everything to delay competition on fixed line telephony by dragging out interconnect negotiations and asking for, to his mind, unreasonable fees after the fixed telecoms monopoly was lifted in 2003. Since then, Lattelecom has implemented what amounts to fixed-fee domestic telephony (but feels like unlimited free calling) as part of its Mājas komplekts (Home Package) of DSL internet and phone service (with IPTV tacked on recently).
As Šmidre sees it, Baltcom (now facing cut-throat competition on foreign calls, with Skype looming over everything) was screwed out of a couple of good years building up its fixed telephony business and is now paying back the villain, Lattelecom, by tossing a wrench into the works. The government may well have to treat the Alīna letter as a legitimate request to privatize, complicating any decision on the Lattelecom management/staff buy-out proposal.
On this issue, the Latvian government is officially sending TeliaSonera the proposal and will decide what to do based on the half-mother's response. But as far as I know, that is pretty much a done deal. Lattelecom CEO Nils Melngailis, in Stockholm for a conference a couple of weeks ago, strolled 300 meters to TeliaSonera headquarters where he got an informal, but definite nod of approval from the half-mother. Who else is going to get TeliaSonera out of a 49 % no-future holding in Lattelecom that also holds the whole Latvian company hostage to uncertainty?
The logic of much of this has not deterred my former employer, Dienas bizness, from publishing some bizarro interpretations of what is going on, but that is another story. My Latvian readers know what I am talking about.
I should be writing more on this blog, but my usual evening writing hours have been ruined by the Latvian premier of the TV series Jericho. No, there is not an episode every night. There are informal sources for the original US series, almost all of it, so I am watching several episodes a night :).
Alīna has sent a letter to the Latvian government expressing interest in acquiring a piece of Lattelecom. One reason, according to the news agency LETA, is that Lattelecom should be held to its committment to provide services to unprofitable customers. Otherwise, there are few details as to what Alīna would do as an investor in Lattelecom. Certainly, it is doubtful that Šmidre could buy the whole company (at LVL 290 million if its 23 % share in Latvian Mobile Telephone/LMT is discounted, otherwise LVL 450 million) alone, and saying that you are buying a company that you intend to force into unprofitable businesses is not the best way to get co-investors.
But that is not the problem. Pēteris is pounding on an open door on this issue, since the Latvian regulatory authority has always insisted that Lattelecom, as a market dominant operator, has a duty to provide universal service. Currently a government working group is studying how to fund universal service provision and who should be eligible. Raimonds Bergmanis, the head of the Communications Department of the Ministry of Transport, is inclined to favor a system of open regional tenders for utilizing the fund, that is, allowing all service providers to bid for providing subsidized universal service. More likely than not, the fastest and cheapest solution will be wireless. So Lattelecom is unlikely to be deeply involved in any of this.
So why all this? One simple theory is the bad blood between Baltcom and Lattelecom. Šmidre has always maintained that Lattelecom did everything to delay competition on fixed line telephony by dragging out interconnect negotiations and asking for, to his mind, unreasonable fees after the fixed telecoms monopoly was lifted in 2003. Since then, Lattelecom has implemented what amounts to fixed-fee domestic telephony (but feels like unlimited free calling) as part of its Mājas komplekts (Home Package) of DSL internet and phone service (with IPTV tacked on recently).
As Šmidre sees it, Baltcom (now facing cut-throat competition on foreign calls, with Skype looming over everything) was screwed out of a couple of good years building up its fixed telephony business and is now paying back the villain, Lattelecom, by tossing a wrench into the works. The government may well have to treat the Alīna letter as a legitimate request to privatize, complicating any decision on the Lattelecom management/staff buy-out proposal.
On this issue, the Latvian government is officially sending TeliaSonera the proposal and will decide what to do based on the half-mother's response. But as far as I know, that is pretty much a done deal. Lattelecom CEO Nils Melngailis, in Stockholm for a conference a couple of weeks ago, strolled 300 meters to TeliaSonera headquarters where he got an informal, but definite nod of approval from the half-mother. Who else is going to get TeliaSonera out of a 49 % no-future holding in Lattelecom that also holds the whole Latvian company hostage to uncertainty?
The logic of much of this has not deterred my former employer, Dienas bizness, from publishing some bizarro interpretations of what is going on, but that is another story. My Latvian readers know what I am talking about.
I should be writing more on this blog, but my usual evening writing hours have been ruined by the Latvian premier of the TV series Jericho. No, there is not an episode every night. There are informal sources for the original US series, almost all of it, so I am watching several episodes a night :).
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Look out Latvian cable operators
Had dinner with a couple of mid-level honchos here in Cannes. The upshot of it is that cable operators in Latvia have to start preparing to switch platforms, at least for their premium customers, who will want, say, Baltkom TV and IZZI to deliver HD TV when it is available. Also, as the price of flat-screen, HD ready TVs drops (and credit to buy these, say LVL 750, toys is easy to get). there will be a ready market for anyone who can deliver, meaning -- Lattelekom (if they push ADSL2+ to the max or run fiber to the curb and gigabit Ethernet), Latvenergo (for their fiber to the home customers) and the satellite people (VIASAT, LVL 5 HD Digital Dishes in late 2007, anyone). IPTV is the only alternative, providing you can deliver reliable last-mile bandwidth, which you may not be able to do with several HD channels over MMDS or coaxial cable. So time to think of the near future. Did I say Cisco? Worth considering...
Not writing in my usual typestyle because Firefox access to Blogger is AFU (all f**ked up).
Not writing in my usual typestyle because Firefox access to Blogger is AFU (all f**ked up).
Friday, December 22, 2006
Digital TV resurfaces
Just a brief note -- Baltcom together with Latvian Independent Television (LNT) has proposed a private sector solution for digital terrestrial broadcast. The companies essentially want to revive a project killed by scandal in 2003 with some hope of implementing privately-financed digital broadcast TV in Latvia sometime in the 2010s.
Meanwhile, the market for digital broadcast (as far as reaching audiences with any purchasing power) has been pre-empted by cable in the cities (Baltcom and IZZI both offer digital cable in Riga) and digital satellite outside the cable footprint (ViaSat is selling satellite dishes for LVL 1 with a subscription package).
This project creates a small hope that Latvia will not be the last country in Europe with an aging and unwatched (by the commercially interesting audience) analog TV service. It will, instead, in 2015 or whatever, be the last country to get a largely unwatched digital terrestrial broadcast system (with everyone watching satellite or global broadband TV via superfast HSDPA or a successor technology).
Meanwhile, the market for digital broadcast (as far as reaching audiences with any purchasing power) has been pre-empted by cable in the cities (Baltcom and IZZI both offer digital cable in Riga) and digital satellite outside the cable footprint (ViaSat is selling satellite dishes for LVL 1 with a subscription package).
This project creates a small hope that Latvia will not be the last country in Europe with an aging and unwatched (by the commercially interesting audience) analog TV service. It will, instead, in 2015 or whatever, be the last country to get a largely unwatched digital terrestrial broadcast system (with everyone watching satellite or global broadband TV via superfast HSDPA or a successor technology).
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