How the government manages supply in Myanmar


Posted on April 24, 2013  /  0 Comments

Today was the day Myanmar lowered the price of SIMs. Here are the conditions imposed.

350,000 SIM cards will be divided among states and divisions on a monthly basis. In order to prevent the common practice of transferring SIM card ownership, the cards will be disabled if they are not used in the first 15 days after purchase.

Certain rules apply to the new SIM cards, which come with 300 kyats (about US$0.40) talk time value. A 5,000 kyats (about US$6) top-up card must be bought within the first 15 days and at least 2,500 kyats (about US$3) must be spent on outgoing calls every month after that. Incoming calls will be free of charge.

There are additional problems for public since many smartphones do not provide facilities for CDMA networks. Despite fulfilling their demands for low-cost SIM cards, cheaper and substandard China-made handsets ready for CDMA networks will apparently be the only choice for new SIM card users.

Next will come conditions on use, since they would not have enough capacity on the network to handle the demand?

Comments are closed.