GO called a news conference this week to update the media on its investment programme for the first half of this year and to give a sneak preview of GO interactive TV – GO’s newest product and the most exciting of its high-tech developments.

GO interactive tv will be brought to customers over ADSL using fibre technologies, offering great potential to customers who stand to benefit from a highly innovative viewing experience. GO 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 spend 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 GO 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 it 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 per cent 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. The deployment of high-speed fibre networks puts GO in a position to offer customers higher data speeds as well as new services. GO’s target is to have 75 per cent of Maltese households benefiting from fibre by the end of the year.

GO selected Minerva’s platform for IPTV delivery and will shortly be announcing details of the set-top boxes to be used in conjunction with IPTV.

With regard to larger capacity that can be sustained over Internet, GO interactive tv will not be limited by the channels that can be broadcast over the restricted number of radio frequencies available to Malta and intense work is currently being carried out on a channel line-up of over 100 – with many HD channels, as well as channels that will be exclusive to GO.

GO will be announcing details of its IPTV package in the near future. Meanwhile, GO will soon also unveil an excellent microsite where customers will be guided through IPTV’s innovative features, as well as being able to register their interest in this new product and receive ongoing updates on the forthcoming launch. Customers are welcome to visit GO outlets for IPTV demonstrations.

Apart from this investment in broadband and TV, a substantial part of GO’s investment programme is aimed at its mobile network. Earlier this year, GO signed an agreement with global telecom giant, Alcatel-Lucent for the roll out of a Next Generation Mobile Core Network (NGN). Embarking on such an ambitious upgrade of the mobile core has further evolved GO’s infrastructure and put the company in an even stronger position in its ongoing drive to provide a flexible approach for consumers to use new services.

With its 2G network completely updated, GO will shortly be announcing the chosen vendor who will replace the 3G radio network by the end of this year.

Addressing members of the press at the GO event held at The Villa in Balluta Bay, 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 television both an entertainment and an information centre.”

“All this is possible because IPTV is brought to your house over the Internet via a broadband modem. Of course to enjoy HD channels, you will need an HD-enabled TV,” she said before inviting them to a practical demonstration of IPTV.