Vietnam to Clamp Down on Subscriber Base Misreporting

Following confusion and disputes in Vietnam over mobile subscriber numbers, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC) has announced that it is to conduct an audit of the operators this month and publish a definitive list of how many subscribers each operator has.

Over the past couple of years, the Vietnamese operators have had - sometimes heated - disputes over how many customers each of them has and which operator can claim to be the largest in the country. In 2006 VinaPhone and MobiFone both claimed to have the top spot - while Viettel which had been in third position suddenly seemed to end the year in first place.

MobiFone and Viettel have recently renewed the cudgels and are again both claiming to be the top operator.

Nguyen Xuan Tru, Vice Head of the MoIC’s Communication Agency, said that the mobile networks have reported inaccurate statistics of subscribers because they apply different methods of calculation. The audit by the ministry will use just one methodology - still to be decided - to decide if a SIM card connection is active or not.

Estimates from the Mobile World analysts put the rankings as at the end of last year as three GSM networks leading - Viettel (10.4m) and MobiFone (9.9m) and VinaPhone (9.1m) followed by two CDMA operators, S-Fone (3.4m) and VP Telecom (2.8m). HT Mobile is migrating from CDMA to GSM and has a negligible number of subscribers. It is worth noting that none of the GSM operators has launched 3G services, while both the CDMA networks have nearly 800,000 EV-DO capable subscribers between them.

Posted to the site on 11th May 2008

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