NTT and Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom opened an IWON APN from Chunghwa Telecom’s data center (Taoyuan City, Taiwan) to the NTT Musashino Research and Development Center (Musashino City, Tokyo) on Thursday, the 29th of last month. Stable communication without fluctuations is achieved with a low latency of about 17 milliseconds one way over a long distance of about 3,000 kilometers. This is the first international opening of an APN in the world.
To open the international APN, NTT built an APN from the NTT Musashino Research and Development Center to the undersea optical fiber landing station in Japan, while Chunghwa Telecom built an APN from there to the Taoyuan Data Center, which is the landing station in Taiwan. The two companies then cooperated to connect the respective sections and confirmed that end-to-end communication was stable.
Going forward, both companies will use this international APN to promote the expansion of IOWN business on a global level.

Chunghwa Telecom CEO Guo Shuiyi said, “APN is a communications infrastructure that provides high speed, large capacity, low latency and low power consumption, and this achievement marks a groundbreaking milestone towards the next-generation broadband network. The international APN embodies the excellence of IOWN’s innovative technology and has opened a new chapter in our shared vision with NTT to support innovative application services. Chunghwa Telecom will continue to work closely with NTT to develop IOWN’s innovative technology while realizing an international network, thereby creating various use cases for IOWN around the world and contributing to a prosperous society.”
NTT President Akira Shimada said, “We are proud to be able to announce the launch of the world’s first international APN. We are sincerely grateful to Chunghwa Telecom for their high technical capabilities and the efforts of all involved in achieving this wonderful result. We expect that working on international communications using IOWN will strongly accelerate the development of IOWN technology and the rollout of services in both Taiwan and Japan. With the track record of NTT and Chunghwa Telecom, we would like to promote the rollout of IOWN to various other countries. We aim to contribute to a rich society that accepts diversity through the realization of use cases that utilize various IOWN technologies.”
In addition, CEO Kuo commented in relation to economic security, “Taiwanese companies are expanding into various countries, and by using IOWN, it will be possible to implement it in various places, which is expected to strengthen cooperation between Taiwanese and Japanese companies. IOWN technology will play a major role in emergencies. Taiwan and Japan are countries that are prone to natural disasters. By utilizing APN in emergencies, optical paths can be quickly replaced, reducing the pace of connection interruptions. It will contribute to improving BCP.”
NTT and Chunghwa Telecom signed a memorandum of understanding in October last year to realize international network connections via IOWN, and are promoting international network connections between Japan and Taiwan centered on APN, as well as collaboration on business and security related to IOWN.

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