Hi, boys and girls. Did you miss me?

Things have literally been quite quiet here on Ilha Formosa, but it looks like with the new year here there's an uptick in things of interest that I actually feel like commenting on. Such as this (in the Taipei Times):

Taiwan Mobile Co (台灣大哥大), the nation's second-largest telecom operator, expects its third-generation (3G) subscribers to double to 2.6 million this year as it plans to launch more affordable packages in an effort to spur demand.

So the kid wants to party, eh? DOUBLE your sub base? Good luck, chuck.

Taiwan Mobile is following the lead of Chunghwa Telecom (the #1 player in these parts) in dropping handset prices, and sometimes even giving them away. It is also getting into price war territory, with both promising lower sub fees for users.

All this is nice and dandy, but will this be the magic bullet to finally get 3G going strong in Taiwan? Certainly, price-sensitive local consumers are even more so here these days, as seen by how spending is dropping. But I really don't know if bargain shoppers are the ideal market for 3G services, well, GOOD 3G services that is.

As I repeatedly bang on and on about, operators here are just not offering compelling, unique 3G services. They are not tailoring their product to the wants and needs and situational concerns of the public. This contrasts, of course, with Japan and Korea where great, useful content is delivered (at a fair price) to users, many of whom are on LONG train commutes with nothing but time to waste.

Taiwan's scooter commuters et. al need something that makes sense for them to spend their money on. I'm not so sure it's a price issue, but more a content issue.

So will Taiwan's carriers drop prices and also try to make their services better? That is the million-NT-dollar question.

What is Fring (fring.com)? I'm still not completely sure. I attended a presentation last night where one of its engineers from Israel (and the accompanying strong accent, which some local peeps said was unintelligible but was not too bad for me because I'm from Brooklyn, but anyway) gave an overview of the company and its services.

What we know about the company (as I was told last night):

It does something with mobile carriers, allowing you to consolidate your IM, ICQ, Skype, etc. contacts and chat and talk with them via mobile VoIP.

There was some description about the company being like a "phonebook" or directory for something, but this was not really clear.

The speaker seemed to really neg his own products and services, saying that people will find that mobile VoIP calls (over Wi-Fi) really don't sound good.

Apparently, it is mostly in the second- and third-string markets (which was nearly verbatim what was said).

Oh, and apparently it is in some secret deal to launch a partnership in February. It SOUNDED like he said it was with that company Boingo (that works with telcos), but the name was a little difficult to understand.

More to come
-jag

 

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