MAP > Internet Providers in Latvia

Latvia’s telecom market has easily been shaped by the European Union, with the European Union 2002 regulatory policies and revised 2009 the New regulatory Framework that was adopted as the core components of this sector’s regulatory measures.

This country has been a member of Economic and the Monetary Union of the European Union, and it has adopted euro as the national currency. It joined and became a member of the Organization for the Economic Cooperation as well as Development in the year 2016 on June. Its broadband market has continued to suffer from the inadequate progress on the local loop unbundling, though government has gone ahead and stepped up the efforts to be able to build the national fiber broadband network, partially funded by the European Commission.

There has been an effective competition in the mobile market with the extensive LTE services having undergone upgrade with the LTE-A technologies to be able to boost the data speeds. The operators including Bite Latvia have also started process of transitioning the networks to be able to support the services as well as the applications based on the 5G , while the spectrum auctions that were held at the end of 2017 and also in September 2018 is going to allow licensees LMT and the Tele2 Latvia to offer commercial 5G services from the year 2019. Also, there has been some great development of the technologies to grow the IoT, commonly known as the Internet of Things Application, before in Riga that will be able to exploit the 5G capabilities.

Some of the key developments in this report include:

- Report update including regulator’s market data updates, the telco’s operating as well as the financial data to the Q2 2018 as well as the recent market growth.
- Lattelecom is set to be rebranded as tet’.
- Bite switches on NB-IoT network, starting a migration path to the 5G usage.
- Tele2 Latvia gets to secure 50 MHz block of the 3.5 GHz spectrum for the 5G usage.
- Fiber rollouts are providing broadband access at up to a maximum of 600Mb/s.
- Vodafone group goes ahead and signs a deal to be able to provide support as well as the network services to the Tele2 Latvia.
- Lattelecom expands the VDSL vectoring.
Telekom Baltija has been able to secure a ten-year extension for the spectrum concessions.

Some of the companies that have been mentioned in the report include Lattelecom, Zetcom, Latvenergo, Tele2, Baltcom TV, Telekom Baltija, Izzi and Latvia Mobilais Telefons.