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3G in Vietnam: even “the poor” can use high quality services
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VietNamNet Bridge – At first, 3G services in Vietnam were thought to be designed only for those with high income. However, since service providers have been continuously lowering their fee, 3G has become affordable for the majority of people.

3G services have been provided in Vietnam for one year. At first, Vietnamese people thought that these were “luxurious” services they could never afford. However, they have changed their minds.

Trung, an ADSL broadband user, said that he has been using this service since 2006. But now he switched to 3G service.

Explaining his decision, Trung said that the quality of 3G Internet is in no way inferior to ADSL, while he can use the Internet everywhere, and the charges are “reasonable”. Now, he accesses Internet every day with Fast Connect provided by MobiFone, one of the three biggest mobile service providers in Vietnam.

Trung is not alone. More and more Vietnamese people with medium incomes chose 3G broadband services to surf on Internet. An ADSL service package, is no less than 100,000 dong a month. Meanwhile, , it is easy for clients to find a mobile broadband plan that is suitable to their needs for which they only have to pay 50,000 dong

Trung said he could not believe that the charges for 3G services could be so low until he saw that service providers kept on reducing them. MobiFone, for example, has been lowering the charges several times over the last year, since it began providing 3G services.

Most recently, the service fee for Mobile Internet has reduced by 80 percent to 10 dong/10kb from 50 dong. Meanwhile, the service fee for Fast Connect has reduced sharply by 94 percent to 65 dong/Mb from 1024 dong.

Currently, there is gap between the fees charged by big service providers such as VinaPhone, Viettel and MobiFone. However, analysts say it is not big, while clients have a choice of based on the service? popularity, telephone? brands, and quality of customer service.

According to the Ministry of Information and Telecommunication and mobile service providers, mobile Internet is the main selling point of 3G services .

Seeing the growing demand, service providers compete with each other in offering various discounts and promotions to make their products more affordable to Vietnamese customers. As the result,, 3G services are not considered as “luxurious” any more, as service providers aim to “bring 3G to everyone”.

A year ago, when MobiFone officially launched 3G services into the market, Le Ngoc Minh, Director of VMS MobiFone said he believed that with the high demand, his compnay would be able to regain its investment capital quickly. He estimated that some 10-15 percent of 35 million registered MobiFone subscribers switch from 2G to 3G services.

Source: Dau tu