ENG-1992 — Page 351

COMMUNICATIONS AND THE MEDIA

competition to the Hong Kong Telephone Company, initially in provision of data and fax services and then, beyond June 1995, in voice telephony. The Hong Kong Telephone Company's tariffs will be regulated by a price cap mechanism, which will limit overall increases to four percentage points below the prevailing rate of inflation. Resale of private leased circuits for the provision of value added services will be further liberalised, and in future companies and organisations will be licensed to provide their own external telecommunications links.

Among significant developments on the local telecommunications scene during the year, the programme to modernise the local public switched telephone network continued apace, with modern signalling techniques already implemented in the exchanges and 97 per cent of the network digitised, producing one of the most advanced networks in the world.

New 'permission to connect' procedures were implemented with effect from April 1992. Under the new arrangement, permission from Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited is not required for connection of single line equipment such as telephone sets and facsimile machines to the public switched telephone network. However, consumers have been advised to use only equipment that has passed a voluntary compliance test. This test is designed to ensure that equipment is compatible with the basic operation of the network, to protect both the users and the network operator's personnel from electrical hazards and to avoid damage to network equipment. Compliance test specifications are issued by the Telecommunications Authority.

The popularity of facsimile communication continued to grow at the expense of telex traffic which dropped by 16 per cent to 43 million minutes in 1992. In contrast, the number of facsimile lines reached 184 000 by the end of the year. A public packet-switched data network called Datapak, operated by the Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited, offers a wide range of advanced data communication facilities.

Hong Kong is connected to the world by overland and submarine cables, satellites and terrestrial radio links. The more important cables include the Hong Kong-Guangdong optical fibre cable, the Hong Kong-Shenzhen optical fibre cable, the Singapore-Hong Kong-Taiwan submarine cable, the Hong Kong-Luzon submarine cable, the Hong Kong-Japan-Korea optical fibre submarine cable and the Hong Kong-Taiwan 2 optical fibre submarine cable. There is one optical fibre submarine cable being planned for operation in 1993: the Asia Pacific Cable (APC) linking Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Hong Kong Telecom International Limited operates a satellite earth station at Stanley with six Standard-A, one Standard-B and one Standard-G antennae communicating with international satellites over the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. The only remaining external terrestrial radio links are with China, Macau and Laos. In 1992, international telephone traffic grew by 26 per cent to 2025 million minutes. More than 210 overseas countries and territories, and more than 1 078 cities in China can be called using the International Direct Dialling service.

In addition to the services provided by Hong Kong Telephone Company Limited and Hong Kong Telecom International Limited, a wide variety of competitive public tele- communications services are provided by other companies under Public Non-Exclusive Telecommunications Services (PNETS) and Public Radiocommunications Service (PRS) licences granted by the Telecommunications Authority. Such services include public mobile radio telephone, public mobile data communication, one-way data message, public community repeater, electronic mail (text mail and voice mail), electronic data interchange

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