As scheduled, Myanmar's executive government last week announced the
two telcos which would be awarded licenses to build and operate mobile
networks in the country--Telenor of Norway, and Ooredoo of Qatar. Nine
other contenders, including Singapore's SingTel and George Soros'
champion Digicel, failed to win licenses. This is a surprising result,
given that both Telenor and Ooredoo do not have high profile local
partners, while mobile operator bids with star-studded local partners
including Myanmar's biggest banks, construction companies, and
traditional key partners of Myanmar's economy failed to win.
There was even a last minute controversy when Myanmar's parliament
voted to delay the announcement. This was overruled by the executive
government, which stated that the country couldn't wait any longer for
the two new licensees to start building more networks.
Myanmar's executive government's rush to expedite this announcement
is understandable. With only a 10-percent mobile penetration compared to
some of Myanmar's neighbors (which has a much higher penetration rate),
the country has a long way to go, and a lot of room to grow.
To get a snapshot of the current state of affairs, the monopoly of
the Myanmar Postal and Telecommunications (MPT) agency on the cellular
networks has kept the networks in an immature stage, although a lot of
progress and improvement has happened in the last few years.
Currently, the mishmash of networks--two CDMA networks and a GSM
network--has the general public wishing for more. CDMA SIM cards are
pushed to the public at low cost but nobody wants them because modern
sexy handsets from Huawei and Samsung can't use them, and the public is
clamoring for GSM SIM cards which go for about US$200 or the much faster
WCDMA (3G/H+ GSM) SIM cards which go for US$300 thereabouts in the gray
market.
Voice and data charges are also not properly regulated. For example,
WCDMA users are charged Ks 50 per minute (US$0.05) for voice calls and
Ks 4 (US$0.005) per minute of 3G connectivity regardless of the amount
of data transferred. No SMS can be received in Myanmar from other
countries, neither can Myanmar cellphones send SMSes out of the country.
This creates a weird usage behavior among the Myanmar subscribers.
Most people have their data connections switched off on their phones,
and they wait for a missed call, turn on their data connections and then
make a call back via VOIP software such as Viber. This offers more than
90 percent savings for phone calls, and that explains the
disproportionately high 50 percent market share for smartphones in an
impoverished country where most people would normally opt for cheaper
feature phones--smartphones quickly pay for themselves.
Hopefully the new telcos would introduce improved data plans and
pricing structures that should help Myanmar's 60 million people create a
stronger presence online.
source: CNET
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