Vietnam has a population of 90 million, while it has seven mobile service providers with their own network infrastructure. There are also “virtual” developers, who provide services with hired infrastructure. State management agencies have admitted that seven is more than enough and that it is necessary to restructure the telecom market.

Representative of the Ministry of Information and Communication, at the recent meeting to review the achievements and problems of 2010, said that it is necessary to reconsider the programming of mobile service provider development.

In Vietnam, seven service providers now have their own network infrastructure. Meanwhile, the figures prove to be very different in other countries. There are only 3-4 such enterprises in France, while Thailand has 7-8 enterprises. Though Switzerland has a smaller population, it has 5-6 enterprises, while China, a vast market, only has three enterprises.

The problem in Vietnam is that though there are many enterprises, there is a big gap in the market shares, while the development of the enterprises is not equal, thus making the market develop in an unsustainable way

The story about how to programme the telecom industry development to make it develop sustainably and reasonably has arisen after the latest five-year development period, since the Prime Minister signed the decision No 32, approving the plan on developing telecom and Internet in the period until 2010.

In the last five years, together with the strong development of the national economy, Vietnam’s telecom has been considered one of the key sectors which has been witnessing strong development.

A lot of achievements have been gained in the last five years: the telecom network infrastructure has been modernized, while the telecom market has become more competitive with latest technologies thus helping improve the quality of services and lower the service fees.

In such a rapid development, more and more network infrastructure companies and telecom service providers have been licensed. Meanwhile, the number of telephone subscribers and Internet subscribers have been increasing rapidly.

The five-year period 2006-2010 also witnessed the boom of new services and technologies. Especially, the 2G technology has been replaced with 3G technology , which allows to provide multiple services.

Meanwhile, Vietnam has also witnessed the shift from using strait band to broad-band Internet, the boom of data discharge, and mobile applications (making payment via mobile phones, Mobile TV, social networks, while the convergence of telecom, internet and broadcasting has been taking place with a high speed.

In the latest report about the ICT Development Index – IDI released by ITU in 2009, Vietnam jumped seven grades from the 93rd position among 159 countries in 2007 to 86th in 2008.

Vietnam has also been considered as making great progress in the access index (jumped from the 92nd in 2007 to 72nd in 2008) and the use index (from 74th in 2007 to 83rd in 2008). This shows the strong growth in telephone use, international Internet band and the number of households using Internet. By early 2010, Vietnam had been added into the list of 20 countries with the highest numbers of Internet users.

In the last months of 2010, Vietnam’s telecom market witnessed an important event. FPT and FPT Telecom announced the purchase of 50 percent of stakes of EVN Telecom. The event is considered as the beginning of a new tendency of merging and acquisition among mobile phone networks in Vietnam.

To date, Vietnam has had 150 million mobile phone subscribers. “The pieces of the cake of mobile phones” has become smaller for service providers. Experts believe that the enterprises in Vietnam will have only two years more to develop the number of subscribers, before the market becomes saturated. They also believe that the growth in the telecom market in 2011 will slow down, while the market will focus on in-depth development.

C. V