Taking kind of a break

I am in the US for a couple of weeks, the main reason being that my father (91) is wheelchair bound from a back condition (degenerative disc disease or the like) and my second-oldest son (21) and I want to spend some time visiting my parents. Little or nothing is happening in Latvian telecoms, anyway.

Interesting to see how my son naturally uses Skype (my brother's house, where we are staying, has high speed Comcast) to videochat with his girlfriend in Sweden and with his half-brother (12) in Carnikava, Latvia (where we have a 10 Mbps Lattelecom connection). Plus he managed to transfer his entire music collection from his Macintosh (always on) at his apartment in Stockholm to his new, US-bought iPod Touch,

Will be back in Latvia on August 12, still the middle of the summer doldrums. 

Baltic (and other) Skypies can breath easy

Skype users in Latvia (where there are said to be very many) and the other Baltic countries can breath easy, because Skype doesn't see any intellectual property issues with its voice over IP (VOIP) technology. Skype spokesman Villu Arak (at Skype's Tallinn, Estonia skunkworks)said this in a very brief statement when asked about the implications of Verizon's legal actions against Vonage. He declined to comment on the specific case.
The Verizon- Vonage dispute has centered on a set of VOIP patents that allow internet connected users to call ordinary phone numbers. Some analysts have said that applied as broadly as in the court decision affecting Vonage, the patents claimed by Verizon could be violated by almost all VOIP services.
The decision by a US court to defer an injunction preventing Vonage from signing on new customers has probably saved Vonage from a quick demise, although the company has other issues (large churn).
With Skype apparently safe and a good chance that the lower court decision on the scope of the patents will be narrowed, the only people with anything to worry about are Balts living abroad who might have taken a Vonage number from Cleveland or New York while spending the summer at a second residence in Riga, Tallinn or Vilnius.

James Enck shuts it down and other matters

A blogger that I often read, James Enck in his EuroTelcoBlog, has announced that he is closing it down because of a major job change. James is leaving his post at Daiwa in London apparently to join a high powered Wall Street team (he doesn't say who). For one reason or another, blogging is not part of the game where he is going, though he doesn't exclude that he could reappear in the blogosphere. I enjoyed reading James from time to time and took note of his interest in FTTx solutions, probably the only way that fixed-line operators can stay significantly ahead in the bandwidth and speed categories. Best of luck to James at his new position.
I also shuffled through some statistics from the Latvian Telecommunications Association on market shares on the total voice (fixed and mobile) market. Tele2 is the biggest by a slight margin (in terms of users) with 32.4 % in 2006, followed by Latvian Mobile Telephone (LMT) at 31.8 % . Lattelecom had 21.1 %. The total market grew, however, by 14.6 % and the share of "other" voice providers grew to 14.7 % of the market from 4.7 % in 2005. Most of this growth is due to the appearance of Bite as a serious competitor during the year. In early 2007, they chalked up user 200 000, a person in the town of Jelgava who got 200 000 free minutes on the Bite network as a prize.
What is a bit confusing is that there is certainly some duplication of users -- most mobile users are also on the Lattelecom net, if not as voice callers from home, then as DSL subscribers (there are more than 100 000 of them). Also, fixed voice is folding into internet. Many of the 100 000 + DSL subscribers and those using other internet services are surely using Skype a lot. Skype says Latvia is one of the densest user locations relative to population.
In essence, except for charge by the minute mobile calling, the voice market is relatively meaningless as voice becomes a feature of flat-rate internet. In a few years, as reasonably priced flat-rate mobile internet spreads, voice (mobile Skype and the like) will also become a feature of this service. So soon, there will be little reason to talk about voice :).

Shoveling the grave of pay-per-minute mobile

Bite announced it will be possible to call Skype addresses from any Bite mobile phone by sending an SMS and getting the call connected (as a kind of call back). The connection will cost LVL 0.06 and the call LVL 0.40 for 10 minutes. However, once more mobile phones are WiFi or internet capable, and someone figures out how to put Skype on these (Symbian) phones, the era of no-charge calling on a fixed fee mobile broadband connection will start.

Its been a busy day, so I am letting Darius Montvila, a Bite deputy honcho, tell the story:

Bite may announce Skype functionality

Bite has called a press conference for Tuesday, February 6 and it looks like they may announce a new Skype-linked function. In other words, Bite users will be able to make Skype calls to computers and phones (? not sure of this) by indirectly using a SkypeOut type of function. The feature will be apparently triggered by SMS (sending the Skype address) and then talking for something close to the SkypeOut rate for that country. So far, the geeks at Skype have yet to come up with Skype for Symbian, which they said they would have "soon" a year ago at 3GSM World in Barselona. We're still waiting. Maybe the pickpockets and thieving lowlife for which that city is notorious stole the code in progress?
Anyway, the great thing about this feature is that it drops the cost of calling home to a Skyper in Latvia and, perhaps, for calling from anywhere to a Skyper anywhere else. But we shall see...

The Venice Project - not news in Riga :)

Bloggers have been peeking at The Venice Project and, among other things, noting that it offers some kind of social networking tool (chat or whatever) while watch the TV streams. This is nothing new and has been offered for some time now by Lattelecom's IPTV service available (to customers) through the Apollo internet service. Users can chat in a rolling window as they watch shows. Whether this is a good or necessary thing, you can (if you read Latvian) judge for yourself. Mostly, it seems to be cryptic chatter between teenie-boppers (the few times I have looked at it, Lattelecom IP TV doesn't work on Macs :( :( ) .
I wish both original Skypies success. but to add chat to video streams is nothing new. The screenshots, however, don't look bad :).