Chunghwa: Double Speed, Same Price To Find Subscribers

Taiwan's achieved 80% household penetration - higher than the U.S. - by keeping prices down. The market is so close to saturation that modest problems led to Chunghwa actually losing broadband customers in 2009. To counter that, and with government encouragement, they've doubled speeds at the low end. ~$8/month DSL will go from 256K to 512K down. The ~$22/month offering goes from 1M/64K to 2M/128K. That's after an 8% price drop last year. Low income customers get 50% off the line rate and disabled customers also get discounts.
Much of the island can get 100 megabit VDSL and IPTV. Any building promising to sign up 20 apartments will get 100 megabits within a few months. They've just ordered 200K IPTV set tops for $90 each in an open tender. The suppliers - DinYen and HwaCom - surely would love to bring their low priced units to other markets.
Chunghwa often pays less for equipment than giant companies such as Telstra and AT&T because open tenders work.
The U.S. needs to apply them for our $2B schools and libraries program. The information is invaluable. Alcatel once demanded I retract a story Telstra's costs of doing FTTN were out of line because they were twice as high as similar builds elsewhere. I wrote that implied either Telstra was incompetently organizing the build, fudging the numbers, or paying their supplier Alcatel twice as much as others paid Alcatel for similar gear. I pulled out Alcatel's bid to Chunghwa, which was far below what they were charging Telstra. They promptly shut up and never did apologize.
Shyue-Ching Lu of Chunghwa will be in Paris in December for the Broadband World Forum. It's going to be a good show. Written by Dave Burstein

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