Latvia Transport Minister Anrijs Matiss said: “I want to emphasise that the greatest beneficiaries of this project will be the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian citizens, who will be able to easily travel to any Baltic country and other destinations in Europe in the near future.”

Two representatives from each country of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania have been appointed to the board of RB Rail – Anti Moppel for Estonia is chairman of the board, Ugis Magonis representing Latvia and Dainius Budyrs Lithuania. They will oversee the design, construction and marketing of the new 728km long railway line which will enable trains to travel at speeds not exceeding 240km/h achieving travel times of Tallinn to the Lithuanian-Polish border of about 4 hours.

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Mr. Juris Gulbis, Chairman of Lattelecom Management Board stated, ‘Starting from 2008, which is when we commenced fibre optic infrastructure development works in Latvia, we have invested as much as 30 million lats in the network, converting fibre optic Internet into an industry benchmark. Since then the needs of our customers have increased and technologies have undergone further development, making it a generally accepted routine that each individual household would use multiple TV sets, or that each family member would use his or her own computer or smartphone. Total Internet usage has kept growing real fast on our network – each year it has increased by even twice as much on average, which is why we have made a step towards meeting the needs of „a future customer” through upgrading Lattelecom data network capacity up to 1 Gbit/s, which is an unbelievably high speed.’

Mr. Anrijs Matīss, Minister of Transport, considered that, from the point of view of industry growth, it is a highly notable achievement towards enabling availability of high quality and easy to use electronic communications services and quality fulfilment of the objectives laid down in the Digital Agenda for Europe.

Following the increase, the current Internet speed is more than 50 000 times faster than in 1997, when Lattelecom launched the first 19 Kbit/s Internet dial up connection aimed at residential customers.  Sixteen years ago a user would have taken 25 days to download a 5 GB size document, while today this action takes aprox. 40 seconds. Faster bandwidth provides maximum benefit to such households in which multiple computers and TV sets furnished with Interactive TV functionality are used actively and simultaneously by multiple family members, as well as to such individual users by whom large amounts of data (e.g. high resolution videos and photos) are processed on a daily basis.

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