Executive Summary

Case Study: Taipei, Taiwan

The City of Taipei has the second-highest population density in the world. In 1999, it began urging citizens to “frequent the net, and free up the roads. “ Taipei decided to begin transforming itself into a “ CyberCity” by delivering a full roster of e-Government services to its 120,000 house-holds, expanding school computer facilities, and creating Web sites to integrate municipal agencies and public schools.

As part of a follow-up plan, in February 2004, the CyberCity initiative took a new and exciting turn with the launch of a broad-scale wireless infrastructure project to bring ubiquitous broadband access to 90 percent of citizens. With the goal of positioning Taipei as the world’s first complete mobile city, the M-Taipei Project will bridge the digital divide, revolutionize communications, provide innovative services to citizens, and fuel the development of the city’s domestic IT industry.

Through a nine-year public-private partnership between the city and Q-Ware Systems, a successful Mainland systems provider, M-Taipei will be owned and operated by Q-ware Systems while the city provides lamps, trees, subway stations, and public buildings to enable Q-ware to install access points.

“We’re trying to help Q-ware do the job smoothly, so we have made an administrative mandate for the power supply and the backhaul transmission to reduce their uncertainties and their risk in this project, “ said Deputy Mayor Pu-Tsung King. M-Taipei is set up to take advantage of market forces by serving both general consumers and the government at the same time. Q-ware will bare the risks of running the business, while sharing 1 to 3 percent of its revenues with the city.

King added: “ The market is the most viable mechanism of developing wireless LAN because of the high-power incentive. The government sector is always labeled the low-powered incentives partner. For our part, we must release as many resources, legally, as possible, to keep [Q-Ware] in the game. We cannot afford to have this project fail.“

Nevertheless, the effort has generated a political risk for the government. “We’re very cautious because we must face the city council,“ King says. The three-phased rollout is scheduled for completion in June 2006.

Taipei has applied an ecosystem concept to generate a bundle effect of applications and services. “Wi-Fi must ally with other services to share the network’s effects,“ King says. “We tried to make products compatible with the network.“

The downstream market includes handheld devices and content applications, so the network will enable high-bandwidth mobile, voice, Internet, video, and multimedia applications, some of which will be accessible by cell phones and PDAs. These devices will have public-transport and micro-payment chips as well as voice-over IP.

“We’re sure VoIP is going to be a killer application for the citizens of Taipei because they all are naturally technology savvy,“ King says. Streaming video, ring tones, and messaging will also be enabled over the network.

M-Taipei envisions an almost endless array of applications, from e-Business and e-Education to GIS, high-tech corridors, enterprise, industrial parks, and intelligent transport. Q-Ware’s WIFLY service will connect public schools, financially disadvantaged families, disadvantaged citizens, and government agencies as well as provide a revenue-generating commercial service.