Norway based telecommunication firm Telenor
has managed to bag the crucial telecom
licenses in Myanmar, which is still one of the untapped worldwide mobile
phone markets for sure. Along with it, Qatar
Telecommunications too has won the licenses.
India’s one of the leading telecom firm Bharti Airtel, and nine other companies too had applied for the
licenses, but none of them were able to find success. This news came on the
last Thursday from the Myanmar government itself.
Eventually the Myanmar government published an official statement to
acknowledge to whole matter. In that statement it said, “The government committee in charge of license bids is pleased
to announce that Telenor Mobile Communications and Ooredoo (Qatar Telecom) have
been selected as the two successful applicants.”
A large number of applications were received since the Myanmar
government announced that it would issue two new telecom licenses to the
interested entities. Around 91 different telecom organizations had applied for
it, and only 12 of them were shortlisted by the official committee of the
government. It has to be added here that global telecom giants like Vodafone, Telecom-Orange,
Marubeni Corporation and SingTel were among shortlisted firms.
These two licenses were very crucial as this is the very first time Myanmar
allowed private funds in the telecom sector. The main motto of the government
is to boost up the overall density of the country-wide tele-market to at least
75 to 80 percent within 2015-16. This means Qatar Telecom and Telenor will be
first set of private investors cum operators to give away telecom services in
the cities of Myanmar.
Telenor released an official statement on this topic, and it said that
very soon it will be discussing with the Myanmar authorities to complete the
whole process. In the statement it said,
"If
a final license is granted, Telenor will build a state-of-the-art mobile
network using HSPA and LTE-ready (4G) technologies, and aims to achieve
nationwide network coverage within five years. Mobile voice and data services
will be commercially launched by in 2014."
Currently, state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) is the
main source of telecommunication purposes in the country and Yatanarpon
Teleport (YTP) is the front-running Internet Service Provider in the states of
Myanmar. You should know that YTP is basically a joint venture between the
government and a few local companies that are privately owned.
If we go by the official data as of the end of December 2012 then Myanmar’s
current mobile base comprised around 5.44 million subscribers or 9 percent of
total population. Out of this around 67% (or 3.62 million) of the subscribers were
using GSM, 14 percent (or 0.74 million) were using WCDMA technology supported
mobile services and 20% (or 1.1 million) were using CDMA for their daily
telecommunication activities.
Final Words
We think as now Telenor has
won the Myanmar telecom licenses, it
will start its plan of action very soon. On the other hand the loosing
operators like Airtel need to pull up their socks in order to get back in the
right path. Earlier Airtel announced that very soon it would introduce its very
own its low-tariff, high volume business model to Myanmar. We need to have an
eye on it.
If you like this article, then please feel free to share it with your
friends and families. Always remember that sharing is caring. Don’t forget to
subscribe to our e-mail list in order to receive all the latest tech news right
at your own inbox.
I have read this information and it is really a great thing that telecom industry is developing day by day.
ReplyDeleteHigh Speed Broadband Service in Miami