LIRNEasia organized and moderated two panels at CommunicAsia 2015 in Singapore earlier this week. Senior Policy Fellow Abu Saeed Khan will write about the session that he moderated. I was about to write about mine, when Don Sambandaraksa, one of Asia’s best telecom journalists, did this piece for Telecompaper:
Myanmar currently has three mobile operators, namely Telenor, Ooredoo, and state-owned Myanma Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), which has partnered with Japan’s KDDI. Myanmar will soon have a fourth operator, ISP Yatanarpon Teleport (YTP). Demand for mobile services in Myanmar is on the rise. “Whatever SIM cards they [the operators] distribute are selling like hot cakes,” said Tin.
Mobile penetration in Myanmar grew to 25.4 percent in this year’s first quarter, from 18.7 percent in December 2014, and 11.7 percent in the third quarter of 2014. Nearly 50 current of customers who purchase a mobile phone in the country want a data plan. Smartphones account for 70 percent of all phones sold on the market. “The prices of 3G handsets are coming down very rapidly,” the deputy minister said.
Myanmar has around 30 Gbps of international bandwidth provided by the incumbent, rising to around 40 Gbps including the infrastructure being built by Telenor and Ooredoo. This will increase to 120 Gbps over the next two to three years. “We need to have 200 Gbps bandwidth,” Tin said.
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