A small error in how Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) calculates the duration of calls made by cellphone users could be adding NT$400 million (US$13 million) per year to the bottom line of Taiwan's biggest telecom operator, the Consumers’ Foundation (消基會) said yesterday.
The foundation held a press conference after a complaint from a Chunghwa Telecom subscriber who discovered that Chunghwa Telecom charged her for longer than her calls lasted.
After comparing call duration records on her phone and her monthly phone bill, the subscriber found that the duration of 52 of the 66 calls she made in May were calculated differently, foundation chairman Cheng Jen-hung (程仁宏) said.
Analysis of the phone bill showed that there was one extra second in 47 calls and two extra seconds in five other calls in the bill, Cheng said, adding that the extra seconds calculated on the bill cost the subscriber an extra NT$3.97 in May.
The firm has 8.75 million cellphone users. If it charged every user an additional NT$4 per month, it would earn at least NT$400 million more per year, Cheng said.
Chunghwa Telecom acknowledged that the time for each call does not end until its machine receives the signal from the users’ cellphones and therefore there was “a minor difference,” he said.
Cheng urged the National Communications Commission to ask operators to calibrate their machines and refund subscribers.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by