Taiwan Mobile has urged the National Communications Commission (NCC) to consider abandoning rules ensuring net neutrality, which it said would give telecoms more operational flexibility.
The principle of net neutrality requires Internet service providers to treat all types of data transmission equally, regardless of the content, the source and the number of users accessing the same content.
Taiwan Mobile president James Cheng (鄭俊卿) last week made the remarks at a forum attended by NCC chairwoman Nicole Chan (詹婷怡), NCC vice chairperson Weng Po-tsung (翁柏宗) and senior executives from five major local telecoms.
In a presentation, the company showed that 70 percent of telecom subscribers are fourth-generation (4G) mobile data users.
Most customers pay fixed monthly fees for unlimited access to mobile Internet and this has led to a dramatic increase in data communication traffic, the presentation showed.
Taiwanese 4G subscribers on average used more than 13.2 gigabytes (GB) each month, about 3.8 times as much as third-generation (3G) subscribers, the company said.
Despite the increased data traffic, telecoms have not seen their revenue grow. Instead, revenue has dropped from NT$217 billion in 2008 to NT$209 billion (US$7.27 billion to US$7 billion at the current exchange rate) last year.
Cheng said that the increase in data traffic is driven mostly by people accessing over-the-top (OTT) content provided by foreign platforms.
Local consumers use local telecoms’ networks to access foreign content, boosting revenues for OTT content providers, who collect nearly 90 percent of the online advertising revenue, Cheng said
“Telecoms have to expand their bandwidth, and maintain and operate the Internet, but they do not see a substantial increase in revenue,” Cheng said, adding that telecoms receive complaints from subscribers when their connection slows down.
The US Federal Communications Commission’s decision to repeal the country’s net neutrality rules is a great opportunity for telecoms to increase their revenues, as it allows them to charge online content providers, who depend on fast data transmission and more bandwidth, or to adopt a system with different tiers of service for different content providers, Cheng said.
Doing the same in Taiwan would allow local telecoms to earn their fair share of the profit, so the commission should consider following suit, Cheng said.
Even though the nation does not have specific net neutrality laws, consumers can still file complaints and request that the NCC intervene if telecoms charge certain Web sites higher fees or transmit them at lower speeds, Cheng said.
In addition to addressing net neutrality, the government should also cut red tape that prevents telecoms from developing innovative services, Cheng said.
“The is no lack of talented people in Taiwan, but innovation will never happen if the government does not relax regulations,” Cheng said.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods