Latvian operator Triatel highlighted the company’s use of wireless technology to provide an alternative to fixed internet options in the country, which outside of the capital Riga has a small population distributed across a wide geography.
Speaking at an event in the country this week, Raimonds Pelna, CEO of the company, said that “we want to start to compete with wireline. I am saying to our customers that we are doing DSL, but we are wireless”.
According to the executive, in Latvia DSL lines offer speeds of up to 10Mbit/s, meaning that wireless technology can offer an acceptable performance to provide an alternative. “It’s DSL speed, but we can sell in each rural house or building, everywhere in Latvia,” he said.
The company is using CDMA450 technology, which benefits from using a low frequency band (450MHz) that can deliver a broad geographic coverage from a smaller number of base stations.
Viktors Topors, Triatel’s technical director, said that it has achieved 98 percent geographic coverage with 160 base stations, while an LTE rollout using the 800MHz digital dividend spectrum would require “more than 600 base stations”.
Pelna noted that with the population focused on a handful of regions, only one of its competitors – LMT – is also rolling out its network to smaller cities as well. But he also observed differences between the two players’ strategies: “As we see it, LMT and HSPA offer good technology for smartphones. We are going to into internet to the home.”
For all the benefits of CDMA450 in providing coverage over a wide area, Triatel is mulling switching off “five to seven” base stations that are economically not viable when EU funding is removed next year. This will reduce coverage by “about five to six percent”, and impact “several hundred” private customers.
“We need at least 50 or 100 customers on a base station. And there are some regions where there is only one police officer, and maybe on the border with Russia they need some data, and there are no other customers. We are covering only forests and forests. Maybe in the future people will start to live in forests and use data, but we cannot find customers now,” Pelna said.
With use of the network in these regions largely confined to government bodies, the executive said it will “start to discuss” its plans with the authorities next year – the EU project is set to end in the second quarter.
Triatel currently offers services at a “mid-price” when compared to DSL, with the CEO noting that “a niche player cannot be the most expensive”.
It is also offering unlimited data transfers, which he acknowledged as being “very risky”. “I think we will do this this year, next year, and after that we will look at what has happened with the network, but I think that capacity will be enough for this niche we have in Latvia.”
He said that even where customers are offered unmetered services, “mainly” usage is around 6GB per month, meaning there is the potential for a lower-cost, capped alternative to succeed – if the proposition can be communicated to customers.
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