How wired is Taiwan? Taiwan is wired, and wireless

January 6, 2005

Here's a handful of interesting statistics provided by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics regarding telecommunications and Internet penetration in Taiwan.

The number of mobile phone accounts in Taiwan stood at 21.81 million as of the end of November. With 23 million people in Taiwan, it looks like just about everyone that can hold one has one. Surprisingly, this is 13.1% less than at the same time the previous year. It turns out that mobile phone companies commenced auditing work in April aimed at terminating accounts for which payments have not been received.

And, while the lower number of accounts may now more accurately reflects the number of actual users, the amount of time cell users spend on their phones is up 8.8% on the year to 23.12 billion minutes in the first eleven months of the year. However, due to reductions in payment rates, mobile phone operators have only seen their revenues climb by 4.6% to NTD 181.4 billion this year up to the end of November.

There are also 8.01 million Internet accounts in Taiwan as of the end of November, up 1.7% from last year. Broadband accounts make up 3.65 million of Taiwan's Internet accounts, an increase of 24.8% on the year.

The DGBAS also reports that the percentage of Taiwanese households with computers grew from 3.95% to 56.8% in the fourteen year period from 1988 to 2002.

Despite the rapid uptake of these new technologies, people here are still using land lines to place calls. The number of landline telephone accounts rose 1.4% to 13.53 million as of the end of November this year. In this period, Taiwanese talked and listened on local calls for a total of 28.49 billion minutes on land lines. This is 19.9% less than the time they spent on land lines in 2003. These statistics seem to indicate that the time spent on mobile phones will soon outpace that on land lines.

With people in Taiwan so keen to adopt mobile and Internet technology, it shouldn't take too long for them to start taking advantage of mobile Internet applications once this next technology becomes more readily available.

(Central News Agency)

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