The National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday it would schedule another meeting next week to resolve an Internet Protocol (IP) peering fees dispute between Chunghwa Telecom (CHT, 中華電信) and Taiwan Fixed Network (TFN, 台灣固網), two of the nation’s largest telecom operators.
The companies met at the NCC on Tuesday to solve the dispute. CHT proposed changes to its service charges, but the NCC did not accept the proposal.
“It [CHT] presented us with a complicated formula explaining the way they set prices, but we considered the new price to be not much different from the old one,” said Lee Ming-chung (李明忠), an NCC division chief.
Lee said the commission believed CHT could drop its prices further as its infrastructrure costs had already been recouped.
Peering refers to the connection between two separate Internet networks that allows customers to exchange traffic. Since a majority of overseas Web sites can only be accessed via CHT’s undersea cables, other fixed network service providers must use CHT’s peering service.
The dispute over the IP peering fee broke out last week when CHT decided to restrict the bandwidth used for the 2G peering service with TFN last Wednesday because the latter had not paid its fees this year.
TFN said it had been overcharged by CHT and asked to renegotiate a new peering fee.
After learning of the dispute, the NCC dispatched officials to both CHT and TFN to monitor the traffic flow between the two networks. CHT resumed its prior service agreement with TFN the next day under the NCC’s orders.
CHT charges NT$1,500 per megabyte if the bandwidth is smaller than 500 megabytes per second and NT$3,000 per megabyte if it is higher. The NCC said this was unreasonable and that fees for larger amounts should be discounted.
Meanwhile, CHT set six criteria for granting TFN discounts on peering fees, one of them being that TFN IP addresses should reach one-third the number of CHT’s. The NCC, however, believed that the specific criteria could not be met by TFN or any other service provider.
The incident last week caused the NCC to launch an investigation into whether CHT has abused its status as the market leader and whether TFN has infringed its customers’ interests.
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