Chunghwa Telecom announced that its joint submission with NTT for the world’s first IOWN All-Photonics Network (APN) has been honored with the Digital Infrastructure Innovation award at the 2025 Glotel Awards, organized by Telecoms.com. Amidst a highly competitive field of leading international ICT companies, the Taiwan–Japan collaboration stood out for its groundbreaking achievements. Chunghwa Telecom is the only telecom operator from Taiwan recognized this year, and together with NTT, received strong affirmation from the international judging panel, demonstrating the combined capability of both companies to shape the future of next-generation communications.
The Glotel Awards are among the most recognized honors in the global telecom and technology industry, celebrating outstanding innovation and digital transformation achievements. According to the judges, competition in this year’s Digital Infrastructure Innovation category was particularly intense. The IOWN APN impressed with its technical breakthroughs, architectural innovation, cross-border collaboration and real-world applicability, setting a new benchmark for the evolution of global digital infrastructure.
To address the rising global demand for ultra-high speed, low-latency and energy-efficient communications, Chunghwa Telecom and NTT advanced their IOWN collaboration from testing and verification to full cross-border implementation. In 2024, the two companies launched the world’s first international APN, connecting Taiwan and Japan with 100 Gbps optical transmission over a distance of about 3,000 kilometers. The network achieved an industry-leading low latency of just 17 milliseconds, overcoming long-standing limitations of traditional cross-border connectivity and demonstrating the transformative potential of all-photonic architecture.
After reaching this significant technical milestone, the two companies accelerated real-world demonstrations of cross-border applications. At Expo 2025 in Osaka, Chunghwa Telecom and NTT presented a synchronized performance featuring CHO-KABUKI powered by IOWN and Guan Jiang Shou, a traditional Taiwanese folk ritual performance, linking stages in Taipei and Osaka through the IOWN APN to deliver an immersive, real-time interactive experience for audiences in both locations. Additionally, at the NTT R&D Forum 2025, Chunghwa Telecom and its Taiwan–Japan partners showcased a cross-border distributed AI data center. By integrating APN with disaggregated computing, the demonstration connected data centers in both countries, using Japan-based GPU resources as an AI computation node. Taiwan-side training and inference tasks were successfully supported via APN transmission, validating the feasibility of cross-border distributed AI computing for high-performance workloads.
Chih-Cheng Chien, Chairman and CEO of Chunghwa Telecom, emphasized that receiving the Glotel Awards’ Digital Infrastructure Innovation honor represents a major recognition of the innovation achieved through its collaboration with NTT, and marks a key milestone in advancing next-generation networking technologies. Looking ahead, Chunghwa Telecom and NTT will continue contributing to the IOWN Global Forum, promoting open standards and ecosystem development, while deepening cooperation with international partners. The two companies aim to accelerate global adoption of IOWN APN technology and build a resilient, sustainable next-generation digital infrastructure to empower future smart applications and industry transformation.
