Prospects for the nation’s fifth-generation wireless systems (5G) market would be unfavorable if telecoms engage in price wars instead of developing innovative services to sustain their businesses in the long term, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said yesterday.
The warning came after Chunghwa Telecom introduced a fourth-generation (4G) service plan earlier this month that targets government workers, teachers, school staff and military personnel, charging users NT$499 per month for unlimited access to mobile Internet and unlimited phone calls between subscribers of the same network. Taiwan Mobile, Far EasTone Telecommunications and Asia-Pacific Telecom quickly followed suit, introducing the same plan to attract subscribers.
NCC spokesperson Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said that the commission respects a free market system, but added: “If telecoms simply want to boost their market shares and revenue by luring subscribers from competitors, rather than with innovative business models, it would not be positive for the development of 5G in the nation.”
“What they are doing does not help to make the pie bigger. They are not benefiting from innovative business models that could sustain them through the maintenance and operation of 4G services, the auctioning of the 5G service spectrum and finally commercial operation of 5G,” Wong said.
“That would hamper sustainable development of the nation’s telecommunications industry,” he added.
While carriers in other countries have sought to provide original content by buying content producers or have expanded their businesses overseas, Taiwanese telecoms are unlikely to do so, Wong said.
“Either none of them are big enough to develop their businesses overseas, or the acquisition of content providers is out of the question because of regulations that ban the government, political parties and the military from investing in media,” Wong said.
Carriers need to have courage and stop offering unlimited data and call service at unreasonably low prices, which would hurt their development in the long term, Wong said.
It is not the first time that telecoms have engaged in price competition to attract subscribers since 4G was launched in 2014. Average monthly fees dropped from about NT$1,300 to below NT$1,000 within one year of the service being launched, in a bid to motivate people to upgrade to 4G.
The tactic was revived last year, with prices dropping further to NT$599 per month.
NCC statistics showed that mobile carriers’ revenue has declined from NT$53.2 billion (US$1.81 billion) in the second quarter of 2016 to NT$49.4 billion in the fourth quarter of last year.
Apart from a continued decrease in revenue from voice communication and a rapid increase in data transmission, industry experts have also attributed the decline in revenue to an ongoing price war.
China’s Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong has asked foreign consulates in Hong Kong to submit details of their local staff, which is more proof that the “one country, two systems” model no longer exists, a Taiwanese academic said. The office sent letters dated Monday last week to consulates in the territory, giving them one month to submit the information it requires. The move followed Beijing’s attempt to obtain floor plans for all properties used by foreign missions in Hong Kong last year, which raised concerns among diplomats that the information could be used for
‘ABNORMITY’: News of the military exercises on the coast of the Chinese province facing Taiwan were made public by the Ministry of National Defense on Thursday Taiwan’s military yesterday said it has detected the Chinese military initiating a round of exercises at a bay area in coastal Fujian Province, which faces Taiwan, since early yesterday morning and it has been closely monitoring the drills. The exercises being conducted at Fujian’s Dacheng Bay featured an undisclosed number of People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) warplanes, warships and ground troops, the Ministry of National Defense said in a press statement. The ministry did not disclose what kind of military exercises are being conducted there and for how long they would be happening, but it did say that it has been closely watching
Recent movements by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been “highly unusual,” but the military maintains a grasp of the situation, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said on Friday, after the military for the first time said it was monitoring troop movements in China’s Dacheng Bay (大埕灣). The minister gave the remarks to reporters before appearing at the legislature on the first day of its new session. The Ministry of National Defense on Thursday evening released an air force surveillance photograph of a PLA Shaanxi Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft, and said it was monitoring the PLA Rocket Force and ground
Noting that researchers have found that 85 China-based blogs and accounts were spreading a conspiracy theory that a US “meteorological weapon” had caused recent fires in Hawaii, political observers in Taiwan said the nation also needs to be vigilant of Beijing employing similar disinformation campaigns against Taiwan. The untrue content concerning Hawaii was written in 15 languages and disseminated across a myriad of platforms including Facebook, YouTube and X, a report published in Gizmodo said, citing NewsGuard, an online news content ranker. The effort represented the most expansive Chinese informational operation to be uncovered by NewsGuard to date, Gizmodo said. The conspiracy theory
RSS