TNAG-2247-FCO40-3230-Business-interests-in-Hong-Kong-Cable-&-Wireless-1991 — Page 101

4) Telecommunications Development in Hong Kong

4.1 Hong Kong enjoys a well developed telecommunications infrastructure (see Exhibit

6) and a strong demand for its services.

Exhibit 6: Competitive Structures of H.K. Telecommunications Industry

International Fixed

Domestic Fixed

Cellular

PCN

Mobile

Telepoint

Hutchison

Paging

Trunked PMR

Specialised Satellite Services

Value added and data services

Customer premise equipment

Hutchison

HK TI

HK Telephone

CSL

Pacific Link

No players - Bandwith being cleared for late 1990's introduction

Personal Communications Ltd.

I

Hong Kong Callpoint

Chevalier

Fully liberalised HIHH Fully liberalised

Not Available

Partially liberalised

Fully liberalised,

4.2 The penetration of exchange lines compares favourably with major industrialised nations, and has increased from 32 lines per 100 population in 1986 to 42 in 1990. Line rentals are amongst the lowest in the world at HK$56 for residential and HK$78 for business and there are now 2.3 million lines in service, compared to 1.8 million in 1986. Part of this increase of 30% has been derived from the explosion of the facsimile

market from under 6,000 lines in service in 1986 to over 100,000 in 1990.

4.3 HKT has a high operational standard in terms of the statistics that are used to compare telephone companies on a worldwide basis. In domestic fixed services 70% of exchange lines are digital, and all exchanges are connected by fibre optic cable. Their percentage of faults per main line reported per year is only 1.7% (as opposed to 2.2% in Japan), and the percentages of faults cleared within 24 hours is 90% (as opposed to 80% in the UK).

4.4 In international fixed services direct dialling is available to most countries. Service quality has improved with HKTI investing in submarine fibre optic cable systems across the Pacific. Hong Kong has the highest usage rate in the world, with more than three times as many outgoing minutes per capita as the UK and eighteen times more than Japan. Outgoing IDD minutes grew from 151 million minutes in 1986 to 487 million in 1990, an increase of 222%, accelerating the rate of growth of HKTI's international revenues well beyond the levels provided by HKTI for our forecasts in the last report (see Exhibit 7).