4G to be licensed in the third quarter of 2016

Hanoi (VNA) - Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan urged enterprises to send recent reports on 4G testing results as the Government had policies to accelerate the licensing for 4G this year.

The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) recently held a review meeting for the first half of this year.

Previously, many enterprises and localities have proposed to the ministry to grant 4G licence soon as the technology is a foundation for cities and provinces to implement e-Government, Internet of Things (IoT) and modern information systems.

Three Vietnamese telecommunication giants including Viettel, VNPT and MobiFone have piloted the technology. The pilot is expected to end on October 23.

However, due to actual needs, the Vietnam Telecommunication Authority (VNTA) under MIC has asked companies to send testing reports earlier.

Therefore, the department will co-operate with enterprises to evaluate quality and then give instruction for enterprises to complete documents for licenses.

Also at the meeting, the ministry reported that the revenue of the Vietnamese telecommunications sector was 93.5 trillion VND in the first six months of this year.

There were 84 million 2G subscriptions in total nationwide by the end of June, and 38 million 3G subscriptions.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Information and Communications, the number of 2G subscriptions has decreased while the number of 3G subscriptions saw continuous growth.

The ministry also reported that the total number of “.vn” domain names is 366,000. Meanwhile, there are 40,000 newly-registered Vietnamese domain names, bringing the total number of Vietnamese domain names to 900,000.

In the first five months of this year, the export revenue of telephones and components reached 14.3 billion USD, increasing by 19 percent.

Export revenue of electronics, computers and components hit 6.38 billion USD in the first five months, up 6 percent year-on-year.-VNA