Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信), the nation’s leading telecom, yesterday said it plans to increase the number of its 4G base stations by 40 percent this year, mostly in urban areas, in an effort to boost data transmission speed.
Chunghwa’s announcement came as the company’s 4G bandwidth is set to expand to 130 megahertz (MHz), after the company upgraded two 2G spectrums on the 1,800 MHz band to 4G, following the discontinuation of 2G licenses on June 30.
Chunghwa Telecom also plans to offer four-carrier aggregation (4Ca) services at the end of this month to boost Internet connection speeds by including some configurations that utilize two new spectrums.
The company is to be the first local carrier to offer services using 4Ca technology.
It expects to accelerate Internet connections to up to 500 megabits per second (Mbps), compared with the 300Mbps of 3Ca technology.
The ultrafast 4Ca services are to be available first in urban and commercial areas in Greater Taipei and some northern Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (HSRC, 台灣高鐵) stations, a company statement released yesterday said.
By the end of the year, the service is to be extended to all metropolitan areas and 20 more commercial areas throughout the nation, as well as all 12 HSRC stations, the company said.
The telecom also plans to deploy UMTS 900 base stations in its 900MHz band in remote areas of the nation to allow its subscribers in those areas to make voice calls on the 4G network after 2G networks have been shut down.
Upon the completion of the deployment, the number of Chunghwa’s 4G base stations this year will be 1.4 times that of last year’s, the company said.
As of March 31, Chungwha Telecom had 7.12 million 4G users, accounting for 66 percent of its total mobile subscribers.
The company has budgeted NT$30.3 billion (US$993.77 million) for capital spending this year, primarily for fiber optical and 4G network deployment.
The figure is about 29 percent higher than last year’s capital expenditure of NT$23.5 billion.
Chunghwa Telecom earlier this month posted net profit for the first six months of NT$20.04 billion, down 11.8 percent from the NT$22.73 billion registered in the same period last year.
That translated into earnings per share (EPS) of NT$2.58, down from EPS of NT$2.93 in the same period last year.
Revenue fell 2.6 percent annually to NT$110.2 billion in the first half, from NT$113.14 billion in the same period last year.
Chunghwa Telecom shares were unchanged at NT$109 yesterday, while the TAIEX rose 0.05 percent.
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