Chunghwa Telecom Co's high-speed Internet access subscribers topped 550,000 yesterday, company chairman Mao Chi-Kuo (毛治國), said.
This made Chunghwa the number-one broadband provider in Taiwan with a 70 percent market share, he said.
"These figures place Taiwan's broadband use above that of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Britain and France," he said.
Broadband or ADSL (asymmetrical digital signal line) is a technology for transmitting digital information at a high bandwidth on existing phone lines to homes as well as businesses. Unlike regular dial-up phone service, ADSL provides a continuously available "always on" connection.
ADSL use nationally doubled from over 200,000 subscribers in 1999 to 500,000 last year. Late last year the ADSL connection rate declined due to a shortage of ADSL lines and the lengthy installation times, according to an analyst from Institute for Information Industry (
After Chunghwa aligned with Alcatel in March to purchase ADSL equipment, the company cranked up installation capacity to thousands of users per day, the analyst said.
He added that at the end of July, the total number of ADSL users in Taiwan will be around 800,000, of which about 30 percent subscribe to Chunghwa's competitors.
Other ADSL providers in Taiwan include Seednet United Digital Inc (
Market breakdown figures are expected in a second-quarter report released by the Institute for Information Industry in August, the analyst said.
Growing ADSL popularity is good news for Alcatel. The French telecommunications equipment supplier signed a NT$7.1 billion (US$218.3 million) contract with Chunghwa to provide 1.26 million ADSL line routers back in March.
According to industry watchers, the contract is the largest of its kind in the world in terms of total value and volume of routers. Chunghwa will also pick up the 1.27 million routers for a record-low price of NT$5,600 per unit, they said.
Alcatel Taiwan beat Nokia Corp (Finland), Nortel Networks Corp (Canada), Cisco Systems Inc (US) and Samsung Electronics Co (South Korea) to win the Chunghwa contract.
Alcatel expects to hold 60 percent of the worldwide ADSL market with 10 million operating lines by the end of 2001, and 12.6 percent of those lines will belong to Chunghwa, Young said.
An Alcatel executive predicted a lot of room for ADSL growth.
"By the end of this year, 1 million to 1.5 million users may become connected to ADSL," Alcatel Taiwan Vice Presiden Jim Chen (
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