Seednet (數位聯合), a leading Internet service provider (ISP) in Taiwan, expects its subscribers to jump by 10 percent next year, helped by fast-growing demand for fresh, lower-priced Internet phone services, a company official said yesterday.
Internet phone services have ignited a new hope for local ISP players including Seednet to take a bigger share of a market long dominated by state-run Chunghwa Telecom Co (
"We believe Internet phone services will be a new force driving our growth in the future. Not a single telecom operator in Taiwan has the services we offer at this time," Cherng said.
He made the remarks on the sidelines of the launch of the company's latest Internet phone services, which allows Seednet's users to place calls from their laptops to any regular phone at lower rates, or for free to Seednet users.
Seednet users will pay NT$1.5 per minute, which is half the price charged by fixed-line operator Chunghwa Telecom, for overseas calls from their computers to landline phones in 10 countries, including China, the US and Hong Kong.
As local consumers are quickly learning the benefits of Internet phone calls, Seednet expects its ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) subscribers to increase 20,000 next year, from the current 210,000.
"That is a conservative projection, if you take a look at the fast adoption of making online phone calls by local computer users," Jeffrey Chen (陳振熒), assistant vice president of Seednet, said.
Chen expected Seednet's Internet phone users to increase more than seven-fold next year, to 150,000 subscribers from the current 20,000 users, about a year after the company became Taiwan's first telecom operator to debut the service earlier this year.
Subscribers will be able to call overseas, long distance or cellphones after obtaining a phone number, which will start with "070."
One drawback is that their friends will not be able to access the Internet phone by dialing the number, as the nation's telecom regulator still restricts the use of the special band.
Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's biggest phone company -- operating a fixed-line business, ADSL business and mobile services -- is considering expanding its Internet phone services to all of its subscribers next year.
"We're carefully evaluating the right timing and proper rates before expanding Internet phone services beyond our corporate users, because any bold move could hurt our fixed-line income," said Shih Mu-piao (
Francis Hsiao (
"It's to do with people's behavior patterns. People are not always sitting in front of a computer, or turning on laptops ... to simply make calls. They call from handsets too," Hsiao 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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained