PCCW hits back with HK$3b system upgrade

PCCW, Hong Kong's biggest communications and media group, plans to spend HK$3 billion on system upgrades next year, according to group managing director Alex Arena.

The investment would be made to upgrade the fixed-line network to full fibre-optic broadband to meet customer demand for high-bandwidth applications such as pay-television, Mr Arena said yesterday.

While staff should not expect an across-the-board pay rise for the new year, the bonuses for this year should be more than one month if employees reached business targets, he said.

"We are investing much more than our competitors," said Mr Arena at the company's sports and fun day held yesterday. "In the past two years, we spent a lot on mobile network and pay-television service. We expect to spend more next year on the optical fibre network."

He said the commercial launch of the high-speed fibre-optic broadband network had been in preparation for a while and it was time for the company to "strike back" at rivals such as City Telecom (Hong Kong) and Hutchison Global Communications.

PCCW last week unveiled its latest full fibre-optic broadband service with transmission speeds of 100 megabits and 1,000 megabits per second, at monthly fees of HK$588 and HK$2,188 respectively.

The speeds are much faster than its existing offering of download speeds of between six megabits and 28 megabits per second.

"We are watching the new technology very closely and we have been investing in the optical-fibre network for 25 years," Mr Arena said. "We launched the service now as applications such as peer-to-peer file transfer and high-definition television are in the market which meet the demand for high-speed broadband."

Mr Arena said the new service, available to all residents, had drawn positive initial response.

PCCW will also offer a mobile service operating under the US-based Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA 2000) technology but will do so for international roamers only as the company had no plan to launch another domestic retail brand for the CDMA service next year.

PCCW won the 15-year licence for CDMA 2000 last month at a reserve price of HK$70 million. It was the sole bidder.

"Our business plan is that CDMA service will be for international roaming business only. We have all technologies and we can serve users from around 250 CDMA networks globally when they come to Hong Kong. It's not just China Unicom that operates a CDMA business," Mr Arena said.