FET had initially launched commercial 5G services in Taiwan in 2020
Taiwanese operator Far EasTone Telecommunications expects its 5G subscriber penetration rate to reach 40% by the end of this year from more than 30% last year, local newspaper Taipei Times reported.
The carrier’s president, Chee Ching, said that it would be reasonable to see an increase of 10 percentage points this year in the penetration rate of 5G subscribers.
Ching added that the growth in 5G subscriptions will represent one of the company’s key drivers of growth during 2023.
Far EasTone has posted a 20% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) from 5G subscribers’ renewals in terms of monthly fees, the executive said.
Also, Far EasTone expects capex this year to be lower compared to 2022, as investment on 5G deployment has peaked, Ching said.
The executive also noted that the company also expects revenue from its “new economy” businesses, or non-traditional telecom services, including cloud-based services, 5G private networks and e-commerce services, to rise to 20% of total revenue this year, slightly up from 19% in the first three quarters of 2022.
Commenting about Far EasTone’s planned acquisition of rival operator Asia Pacific Telecom, Ching said she expected the merger to take effect in the third quarter of this year at the earliest.
The acquisition is still under review by the National Communications Commission and is subject to the approval of the Fair Trade Commission.
Last year, Far EasTone Telecommunications had announced it would merge with Asia Pacific Telecom in a stock-swap deal.
Far EasTone said its number of customers would increase from 7.05 million to 9.2 million as a result of the merger with APT.
In December 2021, Taiwan Mobile had announced a merger with smaller competitor Taiwan Star Telecom Corp. After the two merger deals are fully completed, Taiwan will have three major telecom operators left, namely, Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone.
In March 2021, FET had selected Ericsson as its vendor for 5G Standalone (SA) and Non-standalone (NSA) dual-mode 5G Core and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) services.
As part of the new deal, Ericsson supported FET in the expansion of its 5G NSA capabilities and SA evolution on the low, mid- and high-band frequencies.
In addition to end-to-end network orchestration and management, the expanded partnership included full network design, planning and optimization services, Ericsson said, with the aim of maximizing FET’s spectrum assets by expanding its mid-band base stations and modernizing existing low-band stations.
FET initially launched commercial 5G services in Taiwan in July 2022.
