Video services will become the next star offering for Internet service providers as they seek to expand their customer bases in the next few years, industry insiders said yesterday.
"Operators need to move into value-added services for business expansion," Jack French, Texas Instrument Inc's (TI) business development manager for Asia Pacific and Japan, told reporters at a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
Video services would replace the voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP) service as the driver of the industry in the next few years, French said, adding that high bandwidth is key in developing the new service.
The Dallas-based TI introduced a new digital subscriber line (DSL) technology to local phone companies yesterday that would allow them to boost their bandwidth offerings to provide new services such as voice and video over broadband connections.
DSL, one of the broadband technologies used to access the Internet, constitutes 70 percent of the broadband market worldwide for data services, TI said.
Global DSL subscribers are expected to reach nearly 100 million this year from 60 million last year, and to reach nearly 200 million by 2008, the company said.
TI said the new technology, also known as Uni-DSL, could help operators enhance the bandwidth of DSL as high as 200 megabits per second to deliver high definition television and other advanced video services, as well as voice and data, to subscribers.
TI filed an application nine months ago with the DSL Forum -- an international industry consortium formed by worldwide service providers, equipment manufacturers and interested parties -- to standardize the technology, French said, adding that a decision could come out in the next year or two.
TI is scheduled to roll out its Uni-DSL chipset in the second half of next year and launch its related equipment in 2006, said Calvin Lo (
He said it expects to see the mass deployment of the technology in 2007.
The company is not engaged in business talks with any operators at this stage yet, Lo said.
He admitted that Taiwan's unique "last mile" connection problem could be a potential obstacle for local operators in adopting the new technology.
Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華 電信), the nation's largest asymmetric DSL (ADSL) service provider, controls the "last mile" connections to most households, and is therefore able to refuse access to competitors.
Though Chunghwa agreed to partially unbundle the last mile connection by charging lessees NT$3,500 per subscriber plus a NT$200 line rental each month, local fixed-line companies say the move would not help deregulate the near-monopoly fixed-line market.
"Operators that would like to adopt our technology may need to deploy their own fibers to deliver service to their subscribers if Chunghwa does not plan to use our technology," Lo said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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