Members of the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday accused the National Communications Commission (NCC) of dragging its feet in pushing the development of 4G wireless technology.
Asked to give a special report on the nation’s policy on 4G technology, commission Chairperson Su Herng (蘇蘅) said rearranging the bandwidth spectrum was the key factor affecting the issuance of operational licenses for 4G services.
She said the commission had planned to reorganize the use of several radio bands, including 700 megahertz (MHz), 900MHz, 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz.
However, those radio bands are all currently in use and it would take time to reassign them, she said, adding that the 700MHz band was being used by the military.
The Ministry of National Defense has agreed to relocate to a different bandwidth after negotiating with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC), she said.
Based on the commission’s report, the Executive Yuan plans to launch bids for 4G licenses in 2015 and estimates that the technology could become commercially available in 2017.
The report also showed that telecom carriers worldwide mainly provide advanced wireless service through the Long Term Evolution (LTE) or WiMAX technologies, which are considered by many as quasi-4G services. Of the two, LTE technology currently dominates the market.
Taiwan, on the other hand, adopted WiMAX technology and provides commercial services utilizing the technology.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency responsible for information and communication technologies, has set speed requirements for 4G services at 100 megabytes (MB) per second for high-mobility communication and 1GB per second for low-mobility communication.
At present, no LTE service provider in the world fulfills those requirements. People in the telecom sector refer to the existing LTE technology as “3.9G.”
Nonetheless, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) said the nation had fallen behind other Asian countries in terms of the development of LTE technology, adding that LTE services have already appeared in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea.
“Taiwan has no apparent competitiveness in this field and yet the NCC keeps focusing on fining TV programs for being too violent,” Lo said.
In response, Su said the commission has been negotiating with the MOTC and both thought there could be some flexibility in the timeline set by the Executive Yuan.
Su also said that South Korea could quickly develop LTE services because of a well-designed plan from the government and cooperation from the private sector.
“We need to consider 4G from various factors and cannot make leaps,” she said. “We need to take one step at a time.”
When asked which technology the commission would adopt, Su said it would make a decision after the ITU announces the technical requirements for 4G services next year.
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