APNIC 22
Opening Plenary
Wednesday 6 September, 2006
09:00 - 10:30


PAUL WILSON: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first session of APNIC 22.

Thank you for being here on time, more or less. We should get started with the opening session.

Before we do that, I will mention a few housekeeping sort of issues. Welcoming, of course, the online participants, because we've got webcasting as well as Jabber and other online participation mechanisms running so I hope we're being joined now by some online attendees.

For those who have not explored some of the facilities at the meeting here yet, we've got a new demonstration area for the e-learning project so we have developed a prototype online learning system for use of the delegates to the meeting. If you'd like to explore the e-learning system, it's available outside. We also have a helpdesk outside, attended by friendly APNIC staff and if there's anything that you need at all during the term of this meeting, then please feel free to come to the helpdesk and chat to us about anything that you might need. That includes making appointments for hostmaster consultations, particularly for APNIC members, if you have some particular issues about the request process or about particular requests that you have under way at the moment, then we do have hostmaster staff here who can discuss those with you.

The meeting website includes an online, on-site meeting area and that gives you some details of current events and further details of administrative matters during the meeting, so please also explore that and you'll find that is a jumping-off point to everything else about this meeting, including all the presentations, presentation files are available on the website. We've decided for this meeting that we generally have so many laptops in the room and people are generally online so much that all of the meeting materials are available online. We're trying to minimise the use of paper for these meetings.

Now the program for APNIC 22 is a little bit different from in the past. The APNIC Secretariat staff and the chairs of the special interest groups have got together and altered the program a little bit to try and make it more interesting, more lively and more relevant to everyone who is attending the meetings. And so on the left-hand side here, you'll see that this morning's session is an opening plenary session. We have, for the rest of the day, APOPS, the Asia Pacific operational forum, and that is going to be three full sessions, three-quarters of the day, on a variety of topics of operational interest. And what the SIG chairs have done is to form a program committee for that session and for the overall meeting and to contribute any operational content that they have coming into the SIGs into the former SIG structure into that APOPS session.

It should be quite an interesting session for the rest of the day.

The other somewhat innovative or new session is after the last session from 6 pm. We've got a one-hour session of so-called lightning talks. And that's available for anyone who would like to come and give an impromptu presentation of any kind of wild idea or proposal or any experience that you might be having in an operational sense, anything at all can be brought along with or without power point presentations. I think we have a limit of five minutes or so for those presentations, but this is something that's been tried in numerous other meetings and it's worked quite well as a lively sort of interaction time and so for those of you who have not prepared something for that, you can certainly just come along and present something if you're interested in having a discussion, as I say, about any wild idea which might be - or not so wild idea for that matter, but it may be a policy or operational matter or anything that might be related to the meeting.

Tomorrow, we're going to be having the Policy SIG for most of the day, followed by the IPv6 and NIR SIGs in parallel and the last day, of course, as usual, is the APNIC Member Meeting which is not exclusive by any means to members of APNIC but it's the day in which we discuss general APNIC membership business.

And not forgetting, of course, that tonight we have the APNIC meeting social event.

So without further ado, I'd like to move on into the content of the first session. We have with us here today on this program, a couple of items for you. We did have a welcoming from the local host, TWNIC but, unfortunately, Ming-Cheng can't be here for that. So we'll be moving straight on into a presentation about the future direction of the Internet in Taiwan and that's going to be presented by Mr Shyang-Yih Chen, from Chunghwa Telecom. So I think we'll move straight on into that presentation, please. Thank you.

SHYANG-YIH CHEN: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Shyang-Yih Chen, I'm the Vice-President of Chunghwa Telecom. And the Chunghwa Telecom is in charge of operation of the Internet. It's the largest ISP in Taiwan.

I'm very happy to join this meeting and it's my honour to give you a brief instruction about the development and the future of Taiwan's Internet operation.

This is my agenda. I will give you an introduction about Internet current status in Taiwan and talk about network and service development and how Chunghwa Telecom Developed a HiNet strategy. This table shows Internet users in Taiwan and the number of the Internet users is around 9.6 million - I mean, around 10 million in Taiwan. And the penetration is about 42%. And since the... after 2003, the growing rate is a little bit slow, not quite sharp as in 1996 to 2002.

And, in terms of the household, the Internet broadband households in Taiwan is about 4.2 million. And the increasing rate is still down - I mean, the market is growing to such a rate.

And most of the broadband users are ADSL. And we can see the cable modem is only 6.22%, while ADSL is around 79% in the market. Just because the cable modem infrastructure is not so good to support Internet application. I think this figure is quite different from the USA or some other countries. But this situation could be changed because, as I know, there are many cable operators, they are planning to spend - invest more money to improve their infrastructure. So maybe the cable modem - the market share of cable modem will improve in the next few years and broadband household penetration is over 70% so the infrastructure of the Internet in Taiwan is quite good.

And there are some major ISP and IX and portal operator in Taiwan. I think in the Internet service market, it's a fully competitive market. There are tens of ISP in the market. The majors are HiNet, Seednet, So-Net, TFN, TTN, APOL, etc. The largest one is HiNet. And they are for Internet Exchange centre in Taiwan, TWIX, EBIX, TPIX, TWNAP. And the TWIX is run by Chunghwa Telecom. In terms of portal, the most famous portal, Yahoo, PChome, HiNet, MSN, Yam. That is for the ISP, and the ISP and the portal perspective.

The main activities on Internet according to the 2005 survey, the number one is instant message, second is e-mail, third is search engine, fourth are reading news and the fifth is software download. I think other activities are still for development in the future.

Although the Internet service is quite closely developed in this country but there are still some opportunities for thread and ISP. For thread, we see P2P applications generate large traffic and this traffic could damage the very costly infrastructure of ISP. We are very worried with this question. And we see the network security and the privacy problems is raising - kind of, very big issue. And we don't want the network security and the privacy problem to stop the more valuable activities in the Internet, like SPAM mail and free riding problems. But, on the other hand, we find opportunities, because the users expect higher bandwidth and quality and we see the users need various CPE and mobilities and there are many innovative applications come to the Internet like Web 2.0 and the cyber advertisement, maybe, is a new revenue for the ISP. And the multimedia service, like VoIP and IPTV and Digital Home, are coming.

So these two things, thread and opportunity, will bring a greater momentum to drive the ISPs to keep moving forward and to provide more services to their users.

So what is the future development in the network and the service? With see the ubiquitous network services will be the primary one. The users can use the different devices on in the houses, on the move, in the office or out of the house, with to attempt all kinds of application services, like communication, information, e-commerce, entertainment soft wears. So this kind of network service will be our future.

And if we want to build a ubiquitous network service, then we have to do many, many things. For the terminals, PDA, handset, mobile handset, the PC server, a notebook, even the phone, there they will be attached to the Internet - I mean IP networks. And we have to change our access network layer structure, like cable, xDSL, FTTx, WiFi, WiMAX, 3G or GPRS three generation.

In the transport layer, I think we have to go from IPv4 to IPv6, invest in MPLS-enabled network. Of course, the service layer - information, communication, entertainment, etc, service to be ubiquitous. Of course, management and security are our major issues to discuss or to solve.

Since ubiquitous is our goal, so there are many major programs running in Taiwan. From the government side, M-Taiwan program is the biggest one. This program is leaded by NICI and already allocate 37 billion NT dollars since the years 2005 to 2009. With this project, it promises a better life for M-life. We expect to build the wireless networks, integrate mobile phone networks, set up the optical fibre backbones and integrated beyond the third generation programs and reach the vision of "mobile Taiwan, infinite application and brave new mobile world".

The other national program is IPv6 program. And we hope to with this program get a good result to support the e-society, e-business and e-infrastructure, e-government and so forth. Of course, this program will concern many aspects, like R&D, like promotion, application development and standard testing. OK, so, with this program, we hope we can get through from IPv4 to IPv6.

But, in the industry side, the hard task is digital home applications. Of course, the digital home, this concept, are trying to buy Microsoft and the Intels and some PC industry. But we see there are many new opportunities coming through. For example, in the energy efficiency, security services, elder companion, kids learning, video communication, multimedia entertainment, finance service, all of this will become our opportunities for the ISP side.

And the other topic is Web 2.0. Maybe we say it's not the concern of the ISP but, on our side, we don't see this. We are thinking Web 2.0 will impact our network infrastructure. For example, will our downstream and upstream will change from asymmetric to symmetric because the Web 2.0 is emphasised interactive, emphasised on sharing, so the upload requirement will be increased.

And we think about whether the Web 2.0 will change our business model, especially advertisement. And the privacy and the security will be more sensitive in the Web 2.0 environment. So we think it's a good issue. And all the portals and content providers announced they will provide many new services on Web 2.0 in the next few years.

So how about HiNet's deployment strategy? Since HiNet is the largest ISP, so we have to provide all the infrastructure for ubiquitous services. For the network access evolution, you can see we are changed from two dimensions. One is speed and one is mobility. In the mobility direction, we will go from fixed line access to wireless LAN access and then to mobile access. And in the speed, we will use different techniques to provide few megabits per seconds to the 100 megabits per second, so that's our way.

With the HiNet value added services, I think many services are tied in with the Internet. We will provide VoIP, security. We will provide video, streaming for the content providers, and we are providing gaming, e-learning, also for the content provider. And we will provide Xuite and digital home services. In the future, we will provide ubiquitous services, based on personalisation, high quality and integrated services.

Xuite services, I think, is an important project because we see the Web 2.0 spirits - participation, interaction and sharing - is a new direction and may impact our infrastructure. So we begin to provide Xuite services based on blog, photo, personal portal, network hard disk. And we will integrate the 3G access into this service. I hope it's a platform for the ubiquitous services. Of course, we will take communication to Xuite.

And we will announce a digital home service at the end of this year. It's also a trial service. In this service, we provide information, entertainment and home surveillance at the beginning, but I think there is still a large area to develop.

HiNet also joined the national IPv6 program. We have built an IPv6 trial network and we have many nodes in the island, so we can try how to use the IPv6 and how to connect IPv6 and IPv4.

And for the infrastructure, CHT has a planning on next generation network, NGN. We will invest US$1.8 billion before year 2011. And we want to expand FTTx coverage and expand ethernet aggregation networks. Of course, this network is an access network inside Chunghwa Telecom. We will consolidate IP core networks and the core network of the fixed line, mobile and Internet. And we will transport our PSTN architecture to IP networks. We also deploy platforms to support new services.

Conclusion. We think the user demands Internet services at any time from anywhere with any device. That is ubiquitous services. And our government has been aggressive to promoting Internet service in Taiwan. For example, e-Taiwan project, m-Taiwan project and u-Taiwan project is under planning. CHT will deploy the infrastructures for the ubiquitous network society and provide the related applications.

That's the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention.

APPLAUSE