To facilitate the signing of a free trade agreement with the United Sates, Taiwanese authorities have agreed to open the domestic market to a fourth fixed network operator. The US had been trying to lower the initial US$40 billion initial requirement to US$16 billion, as well as decrease the minimum infrastructure scale of one million lines down to 400,000.

 

Taiwan's Ministry of Transportation and communications has already agreed to relax network deployment requirements, but the two sides continue to negotiate investment minimums. Authorities have said they are also not ruling out the lifting the cap on foreign investment in the domestic telecommunications market.