Vietnam to Expand Telecom Services in Rural Areas
The Vietnamese government and telecommunication companies have set a target to develop broadband services in rural areas in the country and gradually decrease the technology gap between rural and urban areas.
Tran Manh Dung, an official of the Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC), said a program to provide public telecommunications services (PTS) slated to end in 2010 will have benefited 21 million people.
Currently, 10.7 out of 100 people use public telephones in remote areas, up 428% from 2004. The number of Internet subscribers per 100 people has risen from 0.018 in late 2004 to 0.32 by the end of 2009.
Dung said the ministry will continue to implement a specific program from now to 2015, which will boost telecom services, internet, radio, and televisions and develop a strong broadband infrastructure in rural areas.
Rural people will also gain access to broadcasting services and digital TV equipment, he noted.
Nguyen Xuan Cuong, deputy CEO of Vietnam Multimedia Corporation (VTC), a digital service provider in Vietnam, said his company hopes to provide digital content services to residents throughout the country by 2015.
Analysts said the ADSL market is saturated in urban areas, so telecom firms will heavily invest in rural markets in coming years. VNPT, Viettel and FPT now have some 2.5 million ADSL subscribers in total.
At end-2009, Vietnam had 107.5 million telephone subscribers, and 85.7% of them were mobile phone users. (VNS)
Tags: Vietnam telecom services
Posted by VBN on Feb 26 2010. Filed under Telecommunication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
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