Go will shortly be launching its new service, IPTV – TV over the internet – packed with new features including widgets, HD channels, simultaneous recording, viewer profiles and more.
GO’s interactive TV will be brought to customers over ADSL using fibre technologies, offering great potential for its customers who stand to benefit from a highly innovative viewing experience. The interactive TV offers exciting and unique features such as Restart (which takes you back to the beginning of a live programme), Catch Up (an on-demand archive), pause and rewind, recording and games and widgets.
Last year GO announced that it would be investing €100 million over the coming six years. In fact, €16 million were invested last year and by the end of this year GO intends to have spent another €20 million.
The investment in new technologies is in line with GO’s technology roadmap investment and will see the roll-out of Next Generation Network including fibre-to-the-cabinet, mobile network upgrades and investments in the infrastructure to cover new services and applications – including the interactive TV. For GO, investment is the catalyst of its commitment to customers, signalling a determination to provide top quality and reliable service, great new products and packages, and outstanding customer care.
IPTV is clearly an exciting development – but introducing TV over internet is not just about putting together a commercial offer. The investment started with the 1.5km project – a massive undertaking to lay fibre to within 1.5km of subscribers. This involves Go laying a fibre optic cable to the cabinet in or near your street. This allows Go to offer much higher broadband speeds (both download and upload) than traditional broadband over your phone line, since fibre is used to carry the service all the way to the cabinet – in the future this can be extended to fibre to the home, (as is already a reality in certain locations).
Replacing copper with fibre means that GO is now able to offer much higher speeds and capacity – all of which is crucial in the light of demand for broadband that is growing at record levels. To date only 1.5% of Maltese subscribers have speeds of less than 4Mbps.
GO is deploying a fibre network to the home in conjunction with the wider upgrading of the current network, specifically in the last mile towards the users, with the installation of new cabinets that provide higher internet and data speeds.
With its 2G network completely updated, GO will shortly be announcing the chosen vendor who will replace the 3G radio network by end of 2011.
Addressing members of the press at the GO event at The Villa at Balluta Bay in St Julian’s, Vanessa Macdonald, Manager, Public, Media Relations & Corporate Communications at GO said: “IPTV is clearly an exciting development – in fact IPTV will change the way in which customers watch TV, giving them the control they deserve to watch what they want, when they want to.”
“If they get home late and miss the start of their favourite programme they can just go back to the beginning and if they need to get a drink or answer the phone they can simply pause it. Customers can rewind programmes – even if they hadn’t been watching them – and they can even record several channels simultaneously with a few simple clicks. There are also games and widgets – making their TV both an entertainment and an information centre.”