Baltcom Fiber doubles capacity to 5 Gbps

Baltcom Fiber, the unit of the Baltcom electronic services group that owns a subsea optical link from Latvia to Sweden, has doubled the capacity of the cable to 5 Gigabits per second (Gbps) from 2.5 Gbps hitherto.
The reason is is an increasd demand for capacity from internet service providers carrying a higher volume of multimedia traffic. Power utility Latvenergo, which is building out a couple of pilot fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) projects in Riga, is one of Baltcom Fiber's customers. They call it, amusingly, "Optics up to Your House" :).

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).