The Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) is working to improve the quality of mobile phone communications in railway tunnels, a TRA official said yesterday.
TRA deputy director-general Chang Ying-huei (張應輝) said there were a total of 126 tunnels with a combined length of 149km along the nation’s railways, but the tunnel between Nangang (南港) and Banciao (板橋) in Taipei was the only one in which passengers could receive a mobile phone signal.
SIGNAL COVERAGE
The Nangang-Banciao Tunnel is about 21km long and provides 2G as well as 3G mobile phone signal coverage.
Many of the TRA’s tunnels are located on the North Link and South Link, and some are quite long, including the 10km Hsinkuanyin Tunnel (新觀音隧道) on the North Link and the 7km Central Tunnel (中央隧道) on the South Link.
Chang said the TRA has guidelines for establishing base stations around the tunnel areas and proposed that different telecoms carriers could be assigned to cover communications in designated zones.
While the proposal has been under discussion for years, Chang said Chunghwa Telecom was the only operator that had built any of the required infrastructure.
The company has provided infrastructure at an underground section near the Taipei Main Station.
USERS
“Other telecoms carriers are not interested [in the proposal], because there won’t be many users,” Chang said. “Even if we tried to lower the rental fees of our optical lines, the incentives to build systems remain weak.”
The TRA had previously tried to install pay phones on trains, but removed them as mobile phones became more popular.
Currently, only train conductors and drivers are equipped with special mobile phones for on-board communications.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching