ENG-2013 — Page 353

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The Media, Communications and Information Technology

The Office of the Communications Authority (OFCA), (the CA's executive arm and secretariat), assists the CA in administering and enforcing the relevant ordinances governing the broadcasting and telecommunications sectors.

Telecommunications

The government's telecommunications policy is to facilitate the development of the telecommunications industry and enhance Hong Kong's position as the region's telecommunications hub.

Hong Kong's telecommunications markets are fully liberalised. Being one of the world's most competitive and affordable markets for telecommunications services, keen competition has benefited consumers in terms of prices, service quality and choices. This demonstrates the success of the city's pro-competition policy and pro-market approach, which enables. consumers and business users in Hong Kong to enjoy high quality telecommunications services at affordable prices.

Mobile Communications Services

Five mobile network operators provide second generation (2G), third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) services in the city. As at December 2013, there were over 17.19 million subscribers to mobile communications services. This represents a population penetration of 238 per cent, one of the highest in the world. The number of 3G/4G users also continued to rise and reached 11.85 million in December 2013. Mobile data services are available at downlink speeds of up to 150 Mbps using Long Term Evolution technology.

With the increasing popularity of smart phones, the monthly mobile data usage surged to 12,073 Terabytes (12,073,456 Gigabytes) in December 2013, representing 1.57 times and 2.92 times the monthly usage over the same period in 2012 and 2011 respectively. On average, each 2.5G/3G/4G mobile user used 996.6 Mbytes per month.

To enable the mobile network operators to deploy state of the art mobile broadband technologies and provide the necessary network capacities to further develop 4G mobile telecommunications services in Hong Kong, the OFCA assigned by auction an additional 50 MHz of frequency spectrum in the 2.5/2.6 GHz band in March.

To best meet the multiple objectives of spectrum re-assignment (ensuring customer service continuity, efficient spectrum utilisation, promotion of effective competition, and encouragement of investment and promotion of innovative services), the CA announced in November after two rounds of public consultation that a hybrid approach would be adopted for re-assigning the frequency spectrum in the 1.9 2.2 GHz band, which is being deployed for the provision of 3G services, when the existing assignments expire in October 2016.

Fixed Communications Services

The local fixed communications services market was fully liberalised in 2003. There is no preset limit on the number of licences that can be issued, nor any deadline for the submission of applications. By the end of 2013, there were 21 local fixed telephone network licensees,

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