2,000 free public access Wi-Fi hotspots has now been opened throughout Latvia by the largest Latvian telecom provider Lattelecom. The company already owned a Wi-Fi hotspot network, but now it is offering a free, ad-supported access. The users have to watch a 15-second ad and then can use the Internet for 30 minutes. “In the first couple of weeks, we had 500,000 visitors to our Wi-Fi homepage. Considering the total population of Latvia we believe that this shows that the interest is high enough. Moreover, since we launched this service on 1 April, the amount of traffic on our network has increased 2.5 times,” says Uldis Tatarcuks, head technical director and board member of Lattelecom to news2biz Lattelecom’s Wi-Fi hotspots are placed in busy locations where people tend to stop and sit down. “Next step will be parks; we had few users there during the winter, but they will come now. We also will offer Wi-Fi in outside events and continue adding new hotspots.” Currently, Lattelecom is one of the largest Latvian companies: in 2012, its turnover reached LVL 147m and it earned LVL 22m.