Kaohsiung County Unified Broadband Mobile Network

Since 2005, the Taiwanese government has invested over $1.2 billion into the M-Taiwan program to bolster Taiwan’s broadband mobile communications industry and modernize its IP network infrastructure. In addition to building a nation-wide IP fiber backbone and providing R&D grants for developing new technologies and novel applications, it has also co-funded the constructions of four large-scale test networks, and the Kaohsiung County unified broadband mobile network is the largest one. The network construction has three major tasks: (1) building a large scale wireless mobile network with WiMAX as the core technology and supplementing with Wi-Fi where the deployment of WiMAX is not feasible; (2) converting all telephones in the county’s government offices and schools from the conventional PSTN circuit-switched systems to VoIP to unify the two separated voice and data networks to one common IP network; and (3) deploying a host of new application services that include services promoted by the M-Taiwan program and county specific services. This chapter gives an overview of the system architecture, the employed technologies, the application services, the test results, and the challenges.