With legislators showing concern about the skyrocketing bid prices for the nation’s fourth-generation (4G) spectrum telecom licenses, National Communications Commission Chairman Howard Shyr (石世豪) yesterday said he believed the closing bid would be reached soon.
As total bid prices soared to NT$100.71 billion (US$3.424 billion) in the latest bidding on Friday last week, many people have voiced concern that telecoms will end up spending too much on the licenses.
This in turn would mean the cost would be passed on to consumers, or that it would result in cutting infrastructure and operation costs.
At the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) said the ongoing auction may result in a “cursed winner” because the winner may have to use flawed equipment made with inferior materials to make up for overpriced licenses.
This could lead to information security problems, or in a worst-case scenario, even result in the telecom going bankrupt.
The committee passed a conclusion last week that the infrastructure equipment used for 4G spectrum telecommunications cannot be made in China to avoid poor quality.
“Any company can win the bid for a frequency band based on its financial ability, but we will not elect a company for the sake of any outcome. Security cannot be sacrificed, no matter how much they paid to get their license,” Shyr said.
The commission will be responsible for monitoring the service quality and security of information provided by the bid winner, he said.
“The service quality they provide to the consumers cannot be degraded either,” he said.
Shyr added that it is a good sign that the companies are beginning to bid for other bandwidths, and that he believes the bids will be finalized soon.
Commission statistics were released for the latest bidding round as of 4pm yesterday, with total bid prices reaching NT$104.755 billion: NT$28.295 billion for the 700MHz spectrum, NT$7.705 billion for the 900MHz spectrum and NT$68.755 billion for the 1800MHz spectrum.
There are six bidders left: Chunghwa Telecom Co, Taiwan Mobile Co, Far EasTone Telecommunications (FET), Asia Pacific Telecom Co, Ambit Microsystems Corp — a unit of Hon Hai Group — and companies backed by Ting Hsin International Group.
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