The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said it would consult legal experts on whether the government should compensate WiMAX service operators for asking them to relocate their spectrums on the 2,500MHz and 2,600MHz to other frequency bands.
Relevant issues are to be settled before the auction begins in the third quarter, it added.
There are still three WiMAX operators using the two frequency bands: Global Mobile, VMAX and Veetime.
Veetime manager Luo Ching-tsung (羅金宗) said the company has to upgrade its system to continue providing service if it is to relocate its frequency band, which would result in financial losses and inconvenience to its customers.
VMAX representative Lin Feng-li (林峰立) said the commission’s proposal to relocate WiMAX operators’ frequency bands was not borne out of the “necessity to develop the television and information industries,” but so that the commission could generate more money from the auction.
He said that his company would not only have to replace its infrastructure for the service, but also need to pay a higher franchise fee after the commission amends relevant regulations.
The government should appropriate a certain percentage of the funds from the auction of the frequencies to compensate WiMAX operators because they are forced to move to comply with the government’s policy, he said.
Some of the telecom carriers interested in bidding for the frequencies expressed their opinions on the rules on the acquisition of the spectrum.
Chung Kuo-chiang (鍾國強), senior director of Chunghwa Telecom’s legal affairs department, said the frequencies are rare resources and are owned by the public.
The government should not allow telecom firms to trade among themselves for profit, he said.
Wang De-wei (王德威), director of the commission’s planning department, said the NCC has stipulated that any trading of the frequencies has to be approved by the commission.
Earlier this year, the NCC approved Taiwan Mobile’s acquisition of the 5MHz from Ambit Microsystems, with the transaction topping NT$3.43 billion (US$108.61 million).
Wang also said the commission looks at the accumulated frequencies from the previous auction and this year’s auction, and each operator can gain no more than one-third of the total.
According to the NCC’s plan, 50MHz is to be reserved for use by time division-long term evolution (TD-LTE) technology, while the remaining 140MHz is to be used for the development of TD-LTE or frequency division long-term evolution (FD-LTE) technology. To avoid interference between these two technologies, carriers acquiring TD-LTE bandwidth must give up 10MHz to be used as guard bands.
For the auction, the commission has introduced four different combinations of the frequency blocks.
Many telecom companies have rejected the model that divides the bandwidths into four frequency blocks of 35MHz and one block of 50MHz.
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
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
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