Broadband roll-out ahead of schedule

VILNIUS - Racing Lithuania toward harboring the fastest national broadband Internet in Europe, one of the country’s leading telecom companies, TEO, have announced their plan to roll out 70 million litas (20.3 million euros) through the sector over 2011. The company has stated this portion of their ongoing investments into extending Lithuania’s high-speed broadband, which will reach 325 million litas overall by the end of the year, will go towards installing fiber optics direct to homes across the country.

TEO has claimed the FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) installations, which will replace DSL technologies, would allow customers of the company to receive net speeds of 300 Mbps, higher than much of the technological world, at no extra cost.
“We have reached the situation now, where nearly each second household is able to have fiber in Lithuania, and approximately 110,000 are already installed with real fiber connections,” TEO chief technology officer Darius Didzgalvis told The Baltic Times.

“We have three payment plans in DSL for our residential customers, but the speeds are different. The same three plans are there for fiber. Prices are the same, but the speed is much higher.”
Didzgalvis predicted utilizing the high-speed fiber network could potentially allow Lithuanian residential homes and businesses to access some of the most advanced technology available online, including data streaming, gaming and Cloud computing.

“The main thing about fiber is there are no speed limitations. The main infrastructure is suitable for 1GB, or 10GB, in the future, no problem,” he claimed.
He speculated technology such as video conferencing equipment, which could provide high-definition picture quality to be relayed from anywhere in the world, could alter the way corporations do business. “It’s very convenient for an organization. It means you no longer have to spend hours flying and spending huge amounts of money for operators. You just sit and watch a picture with more or less really high quality,” he explained.

Marius Parescius, business manager of popular Lithuanian networking Web site Draugas.lt, which hosts over one million users per month, has said fiber connections have opened the capacity for Internet companies like his to utilize securer data transfers, and greater opportunities for business expansion. “TEO is helping this. They have added a lot of high quality services on the fiber. You can even rent a movie. We were thinking about video rental services. As developers, we’ve been talking with people who want to add such services here in Lithuania, because the high-speed connections available to homes allow it.”

He mentioned how, due to the updated technologies, the future for Lithuanian media sectors, such as Web design, were promising. “Everything has changed. At the beginning it was just simple Web sites, with static content. Now, everything is dynamic. You can add content from different Web sites, from different services you can add video, audio, and have video conferencing. There are even such projects as a dating Web site, where people meet via two webcams, and talk to each other. New technologies are coming here. There are huge opportunities.”

The Lithuanian economy remains statistically number one in Europe for the highest household penetration of FTTH, with a hefty lead, almost ten percent, from its nearest challenger, Sweden.
Due to the growing figures, Lithuania was ready to reach requirement levels set by the European Union for Internet modernization nearly a decade early. “There is a requirement from the European Union that by 2020, countries must have around 20 percent of fiber-based customers. The good thing is, Lithuania has already reached that,” Didzgalvis extolled.
Though TEO holds claim to 40 percent of the fixed-line telecom market, smaller players in the industry were also complimenting the growing rates of FTTH, working to implement it throughout regional sectors. The government-run RAIN-2 (Regional Area Information Network) projects by March 2013, their company will have installed a planned 4,500 km of optical cable lines, which will aid access to hundreds of rural properties.

Work by RAIN-2 on constructing a fiber-optic cable to run from the city of Klaipeda to Neringa, which lies in the westernmost point of Lithuania, and is the lowest populated municipality in the country, were currently underway.
“People out in the agriculture, they don’t have the capacity for Internet. Now this project is taking it to small villages, small towns,” said Parescius, speaking about RAIN-2.

Previous opportunities for Internet coverage in the rural heartlands were limited mainly to mobile Internet services, which TEO trashed as being unreliable. “Mobile broadband does not have a good image as country-based Internet providers. They’re good when you’re moving, but not when you’re in a fixed place,” commented Didzgalvis.
A major mobile operator in the country, the Pan-European company Tele2, which Profiles International listed as one of the Baltic’s Most Productive Companies last year for reeling in a net profit of 126 million litas, have said they were not currently focused on operating fiber-based fixed lines, though they “rent it for their purposes from third parties,” said a Tele2 spokesman.

As Lithuania paves the future for Internet modernization in Europe, TEO stated they will be the company at the helm of fixed-line developments. “We are forming the rules of what speeds should be provided to customers. Most of the players are adapting our marketing strategies, the plans we are preposing, and also the speeds,” claimed TEO Press Officer Antanas Bubnelis.