Lattelecom announces jump to 500 Mbps fiber to the home

Lattelecom will start offering upgrades to 500 Mbps of its fiber-to-the-home (office)or FTTH service in the second half of November, Raivis Mackevics, the head of Lattelecom's optical technologies unit told this blogger. The current top speed to its around 2 600 FTTH subscribers is 100 Mbps. Another 700 connections are on order.
Lattelecom says just under 25 % of Riga's households (more that 77 500 housing units) will have access to FTTH by year end, with an FTTH build-out to start in the cities of Jelgava and Daugavpils by year end as well.
The slow uptake of FTTH, which in some package deals is priced under Lattelecom's existing DSL services, may reflect the operator's slow and cautious approach with the new technology. Rival cable TV, telecoms and internet service provider IZZI suffered from a Twitter-driven public uproar earlier this year when its 100 Mbps DOCSIS-based high speed internet suffered glitches.
Also, Lattelecom may see FTTH as the last great hope for its IPTV service, which recently chalked up 30 000 subscribers, compared to well over 100 000 subscribers each at Baltcom TV and IZZI, who offer conventional and digital cable TV. FTTH at 500 Mbps is more than adequate to feed several TV sets watching high-definition programming and Lattelecom says multiple watching of different channels will be enabled with its optical internet.
However, viewing habits may be hard to change -- cable has been around since the 1990s, and Latvian viewers will be reluctant to switch, rip out old cables and set-top boxes and adjust to a new assortment of channels. Also, in times of economic crisis, the number of HD flatscreens owned by households is unlikely to rise rapidly, never mind multi-screen households.
As I put it in my Latvian-language blog, Lattelecom's FTTH "beast" isn't loved by very many people yet. Given the chance, of course, I will get the service as soon as it is offered in my downtown (Center) Rīga building. Lattelecom, however, is prioritizing the so-called bedroom areas of Riga with their large, Soviet-era multi-unit high-rises (9 stories is "high"), which makes sense.

The fastest f**king internet in the world = true

I don't get letters from BMW or Maserati dealers. But if I did, and they offer the latest model with, say, 350 horsepower, or even 500 horsepower, I would say, yeah, cool. But if I got a brochure saying that my next BMW would have two F-16 fighter jet engines welded to the roof allowing the vehicle to do Mach 2 or more (before disintegrating ?), I would ask what are they smoking? Car sales have fallen so badly that I don't exclude the use of hallucinogens to pass the time down at the dealership any more...
I had similar thoughts when I heard some Lattelecom honchos talk about 10 gigabit (yes GIGA) internet connections. Surely, they are talking about the carrier grade line that will link to their various fiber to the home (FTTH) projects (one such line could sustain around 100 connections delivering 100 Mbps). But it was unclear what they meant. Even when the news services picked up the story as claiming 10 Gbps to the end user, I thought, WTF? Someone has been misunderstood. And then I saw it in a press release on the Lattelecom website. Latvians love pickled mushrooms, and maybe the wrong kind got picked, pickled and put on a table at some press office after-work party (Latvians love to celebrate name days, etc. at the office). So I called and double-checked.
Yes, Lattelecom does intend to build the capability to deliver 10 Gbps to end users. The technology exists and is being implemented. I think this will be a service mainly oriented toward corporate users. I can't imagine any home having the kind of supercomputing capability needed to actually deal with 10 Gbps of anything (maybe wire together a couple of Playstation 3 with their Cell processors?). But for the record, if this gets built, Latvia will have the fastest internet on the planet. F**king A!

Lattelecom--500 Mbps internet by end of 2009

Latvia's Lattelecom hopes to implement 500 megabit per second (Mbps) symmetical internet connections by the end of the year, using fiber-to-the home (FTTH) technology, according to CEO Juris Gulbis. Gulbis said that initially, the FTTH connections would have speeds of 100 Mbps but by end-2009 would jump to 200 and 500 Mbps.
Lattelecom has started a three year project to convert most of its current DSL network to FTTH over the next few years. Around 30 apartment buildings in a Riga suburb were the first to be connected recently with the intention to replace DSL with FTTH in all residential buildings with at least 30 units in Riga and other urban centers.
Gulbis said that HD television, including HD films on demand would be one of the services made possible by the higher connection speeds. Initially, however, FTTH will meet the bandwidth needs of households with several home computers and television sets, including HD TVs.
Lattelecom is also in the early stage of planning a software as a service plaform for home and small businesses that would be available over its high speed, so-called "Future Network".
"Our goal is the have the fastest internet in Europe," Gulbis told this blogger.
Gulbis said that the higher speed services will be offered for the same price as present internet and/or triple-play packets, starting from around LVL 20 per month (tariffs have been boosted by higher VAT from January 1)
At the same time, Lattelecom has started to market Triatel's EV-DO based wireless and mobile internet service to more the 30 000 potential customers who cannot be connected to the company's fixed internet network. The service will initially offer 3.2 Mbps download speeds and will be available in around 70 % of Latvia's territory.

Is there a future for fixed telecoms in Latvia?

Janiene Bayliss, an independent consultant specializing in telecommunications branding, was one of the speakers at Lattelecom's annual customer conference. I asked her to comment on the assertion that fixed networks may be a sunset industry, since most of the population of any Western European country (and Latvia) seems to primarily use mobile phones for voice and, increasingly, for data communications.
Also at the conference, Lattelecom CEO Juris Gulbis said that the company planned to start replacing its DSL internet service (max. 10 Mbps) with high speed (up to 100 Mbps) fiber to the home connections over the next three years. One reason for the upgrade was to make it possible to provide HD television broadcasts as part of Lattelecom's internet television offering. Gulbis said that at present, Latvia had the fourth fastest consumer internet services in the world, behind Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands.

FTTx possible in Latvia?

Jay Hoge, an American businessmen and optical networks engineer living in Latvia, voices some views on the potential for developing fiber to the home/office/building (hence FTTx in the title). Jay's customers are almost entirely outside of Latvia, but he lives here for personal reasons and has some overview of the local market. I talked to Jay at an outdoor location (just after an outdoor cafe lunch where he could enjoy his cigar :) ), so there are some moderate problems with the sound. Sorry about that. This will also go on my Latvian language blog, hence the dual-language opening titles.

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" :).

VOOM!!! IZZI launches HDTV in Latvia

IZZI, the mult-electronic communication services company, has launched High Definition TV in Latvia, starting with a version of the US-based channel VOOM. Kaspars Spunde, Marketing Director of IZZI, explains in this video:



Some other interesting hints -- look for IZZI to take part in a fiber to the home pilot project as soon as they find a suitable partner. FTTH is the obvious way to deliver the many HDTV channels and eventual HD video on demand services that will arise in Europe and Latvia in the next few years. IZZI will also soon launch ordinary video on demand. They are also thinking of packaging their HDTV and digital cable offering with a discount on a flat screen TV.
The HD service will cost LVL 3 per month in addition to the basic digital TV service (LVL 4) and rental of the HD decoder(LVL 7, or buy the thing for LVL 240, in interest free installments of LVL 40, if you wish)

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).