Wireless Asia: Under the government's M-Taiwan initiative, you're only required to provide 70% coverage at launch, but for your initial launch in Penghu, you waited until you hit 90% coverage. Why?
Peter Yen: Mainly we had problems with indoor coverage, which we needed to fix because I didn't want to create any confusion for customers who don't understand why it doesn't work inside. So we had to almost double the number of base stations to get indoor coverage up to around 80%, which means on the street it's now around 90%. We also had some issues with coverage in the top floors of high-rises, but the extra buildout solved that practically by accident. We found that with the extra base stations, the higher floors could get better coverage.
How did that affect your rollout plans?
Well, it did push things back a little. We'd hoped to launch full commercial services by the end of last year, but we found we needed to take the extra time to add more base stations to make indoor coverage better.
What kind of consumer feedback did you get from the soft launch?
Well, that was why we had to add more coverage! The most common complaint we got was that there was no service in this location or that location. People were calling our customer care center saying, "Where's your coverage?" Now they're very happy - they see a big difference in the coverage and they can get 8 Mbps downlink and 2 Mbps uplink. And also we do a lot of application combinations, like Google Video and YouTube and VoIP and music services all at the same time, which they love because you could only select one application during the soft launch.
So the content-based services like VoIP and mobile TV and Internet brands is making its debut with the full commercial launch?
Yes.
How are you packaging that for users who could just go and get their own content or use Skype?
Well, we bundled the service portal and the connection manager as a whole. So when the customer plugs in and connects, the services are all there in the connection manager. We kind of designed it like the way Apple does it with iTunes and the iPhone, where you can upload the services you want to appear and remove them when you want.
Are they included in the flat-rate access fee, or do users pay extra?
They pay extra on an incremental basis.
How challenging was it to put all that together?
We spent a lot of time working out the business model with the content providers. Fortunately, a lot of the content providers in Taiwan have been working with the 3.5G mobile operators for some time, so we could follow that track somewhat to provide these services. Still, it's a lot of hard work to get all this together. At the same time, in order to show the consumers all of these services together in one portal where they have easy access to it, you really need a system in place that's good enough and flexible to manage those applications, control the bandwidth and support different rate plans.