Taiwan Today

Taiwan, with a population of about 23 million people, currently boasts around 24 million cell phone numbers, meaning that some people have two or three cell phone numbers. This has presented a bottleneck for telecom providers in that they have to provide a sufficient amount of numbers to meet market demand. As a result, an all-out war broke out in 2008 to entice customers to switch their original service via the number portability option. Up to the end of June 2009, about three million cell phone users had switched to new telecom network providers with their original numbers, according to statistics compiled by the National Communications Commission. One out of every eight current cell phone numbers is not contracted to its original telecom service provider. Telecoms have introduced all sorts of promotions to encourage cell phone users to switch companies, often including free cell phones, special rates, free calls within their own networks, free household electronic appliances or even airplane tickets. Number portability operation has been in practice for four years. During the first three years, the three major cell phone network service providers seemed to have a tacit agreement not to fight each other to gain more customers. This changed in the second half of last year, however, when third-generation cell phone network provider VIBO Telecom began offering free calls within the company's network as well as cheaper basic monthly charges, attracting a significant number of people to switch to VIBO, and this caused a promotions war to break out within the industry. Free calls within the network aside, Tsann Kuen Electronics, an electronics chain, early this year started offering huge discounts to customers purchasing electronic products who wanted to switch to either FarEasTone or Taiwan Mobile . In the first month of the promotion, over 8,000 numbers were switched to different cell phone service providers, and the company's business more than doubled, said Xie Pei-qi, a member of the company's marketing department. In the most recent promotion campaigns, FarEasTone and Taiwan Mobile have even begun offering Hong Kong or Macau-bound airplane tickets to customers who change to their services. VIBO Telecom President Zhang Feng-xiung says that plane tickets to Hong Kong are too cheap to attract people to switch to a different service. He believes that the most practical incentive to customers is to provide free calls within a company's network. Meanwhile, Asia Pacific Telecom has also introduced a similar promotion, providing free calls within its network, attracting quite a few students over to its service. Chunghwa Telecom, however, stressed that it has the densest coverage of base stations throughout Taiwan, enabling it to offer the best quality reception and call quality. It plans to continue to promote high-end cell phones such as Apple's 3G iPhone, noting that it will differentiate itself from its competitors by the quality of service that it offers. Of course, during the current phase of the "number portability war," some telecom service providers feel they are being taken advantage of. Some telecom retailers are rounding up a large number of pre-paid card nominal accounts and then switching them to the telecom network provider with the best commissions to score a significant chunk of change. In other cases, some customers will make an application in the morning to use a specific company's services, and then switch to another provider that evening, the intent being solely to get the best deal and promotional items possible. Liu Li-qiu, a spokesman for the Taiwan Telecommunication Industry Development Association, says that consumers will jump to a different service provider as soon as they are unsatisfied with their current service provider or when others offer better promotions. As a result, telecom network providers have little choice but to continually introduce new promotional packages. Liu says that the extreme competition has prompted each company to think up innovative ways to win over new customers.