Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) yesterday said it plans to spend NT$200 billion (US$6.94 billion) to expand its broadband bandwidth over a 10-year period to 2020 in an effort to meet escalating demand created by new mobile devices such as tablets.
In addition, its burgeoning cloud computing services will rely heavily on having sufficient Internet capacity to deliver data at high speed, the nation’s biggest telecoms operator said.
The new cloud computing services are likely to make a meaningful contribution to Chunghwa Telecom over the next two to three years from 0.5 percent now, UBS said in a report last Thursday.
“To improve network coverage amid the rising use of mobile Internet connections, we are gearing up our third-generation [3G] deployment. Users’ demand for bandwidth is getting bigger and bigger,” Chunghwa Telecom president Chang Shiao-tung (張曉東) told a press conference held yesterday to mark the company’s 15th anniversary.
In the first quarter, mobile value-added-service revenues grew 39 percent from a year ago, bringing data services’ revenue contribution to 20 percent of the company’s overall mobile revenues, the company said.
Chang said Chunghwa Telecom planned to spend NT$5 billion to expand and upgrad its 3G coverage this year, up from between NT$3 billion and NT$4 billion in previous years.
By the end of this year, the company will add 1,250 new 3G base stations to its existing 7,000 3G stations.
To share the workload of 3G base stations and to ease congestion, the company will increase the number of its WiFi hot spots to 20,000 by the end of this year and to 30,000 next year, from 14,000 now, Chang said.
Overall, Chang said the company was mulling boosting capital expenditures for this year to NT$32 billion, from the NT$31.13 billion it originally budgeted.
Chang also called on the government to speed up the leasing of next-generation, or 4G, licenses, which would help the company speed up preparations for digital broadcasting by 2015 as the government has planned.
By that time, fiber optics will account for 80 percent of Chunghwa Telecom’s broadband network. It plans to lease extra bandwidth to local telecommunications operators to help them broaden bandwidth, Chang said.
As of May, Chunghwa Telecom had 2.17 million fiber optics users, making up 49 percent of its heavy broadband users.
Because Chunghwa Telecom has a research team studying 4G technology, it plans to help local peers with 4G testing on end devices and to cooperate on finalizing a 4G standard, Chang said.
Shares of Chunghwa Telecom rose to a record high of NT$102 yesterday, up 0.99 percent from NT$101 on Monday.
“Chunghwa Telecom is our most preferred telco in Taiwan. We believe its diverse revenue streams offer the most defensive option among the Taiwan telcos,especially in an environment of continued tariff reductions by the regulator,” UBS analyst Lin Vey-sern said in the report.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
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],”