Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s largest mobile operator, said yesterday it would be pushing a fiber-optic broadband service of up to 50Mbps this year to attract more users by enhancing its online TV and music services, as well as cloud computing.
The company aims to migrate more existing users of its ADSL broadband service — which is only able to offer a maximum speed of 8Mbps — to the higher revenue, faster optical-fiber service, Chunghwa Telecom president Chang Shaio-tung (張曉東) told an investor conference.
Fiber optics accounted for 61.7 percent of the firm’s total broadband user base in December, up from 51.1 percent a year ago. Users of the ADSL service decreased to 38.3 percent from 48.9 percent.
The firm’s total number of broadband users hit 4.37 million in December, rising marginally from 4.3 million the previous year, company statistics showed.
The telecoms operator is gearing up to enhance its online TV service — multimedia-on-demand (MOD) — by expanding the number of high-definition channels to 33 from 16, Chang said.
It has set a target of boosting MOD subscribers to 1 million by the end of the year, from 810,000 in December. Chunghwa Telecom had 667,000 MOD subscribers in December 2009.
Chang said the telecoms operator is also set to roll out a cloud computing storage service this year to add to the appeal of its cloud services. Users will be able to store their personal data in the cloud by paying a fee, freeing up storage space on their PCs, he said.
Meanwhile, smartphones are forecast to account for at least 35 percent of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile phone sales this year, up from 25 percent last year.
While revenue from its short messaging service remained stagnant, mobile data services revenue soared 85 percent last year, the company’s statistics showed.
The firm aims to boost its number of mobile Internet users to 1.2 million by the end of the year, up from 809,000 in December.
It had 422,000 subscribers in December 2009.
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