Chunghwa Telecom Co (CHT, 中華電信), the nation’s largest telecom operator, yesterday said it planned to invest at least NT$3 billion (US$97.94 million) to double the number of wireless hotspots to 12,000 next year to offer more and cheaper Wi-Fi bandwidth for users of Apple’s iPhone and other smartphones.
This would be part of the company’s increased efforts to ease the burden on mobile data bandwidth caused primarily by an uptake of smartphones after CHT offered subscribers a flat rate for unlimited Internet access.
“An increase in Wi-Fi deployment will help ease the [heavy] loading on the 3G mobile network,” CHT president Chang Shaio-tung (張曉東) said.
The spending on Wi-Fi deployment would make up less than 10 percent of the phone company’s total capital spending of about NT$35 billion next year.
CHT is collaborating with the nation’s biggest food producer, Uni-President Group (統一集團), to expand its hotspot network to 4,600 President Chain Store Corp (統一超商) outlets around the nation by year-end.
That would bring the number of hotspots operated by CHT to a total of 5,900.
AIRPORTS
At the moment the company has 1,300 hotspots in airports, coffee shops and McDonald’s restaurants across the country.
Next year, the Wi-Fi coverage may be expanded to Uni-President Group’s drugstore chain Cosmed (康是美) and doughnut chain Mr Donut, the company said.
Furthermore, CHT plans to offer Wi-Fi service to its household ADSL subscribers by charging an extra flat rate of NT$100 per month per household, beginning early next year.
The new services would allow the company’s ADSL users to obtain wireless access to the Internet at home, cafes and restaurants.
“With such extra services, we will gain more subscribers,” Chang said.
USERS
CHT has 4 million ADSL users and more than 7 million mobile subscribers.
With Wi-Fi services, President Chain Store said consumers could stay longer at its outlets and spend more.
Every day bout 7 million people visit the nation’s 7-Eleven stores — which are operated by President Chain Store — the company 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