The trial of 4G services will be conducted in 2016 and services will be commercialized one year later, with charges expected to be equivalent to the current 3G rates, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Tran Tuan Anh, official from the Department of Telecommunications, said the Ministry would licence three firms to trial 4G services. Under the current rules, each operating telecom service provider is allowed to test 4G in three provinces.

Deputy general director of VNPT Net - Nguyen Nam Long - said the operators are ready in terms of infrastructure, but the shift from 2G, 3G to 4G depends on the needs of the user. 

"Currently, about 40% of subscribers still use 2G, mainly voice and messaging services," Long said.

As for the charges, network operators said the only difference is the transmission speed, so the charges are expected to not change much.

Viettel representatives said that when deploying 4G, it will focus on highly creative data services. 

Meanwhile, VNPT Net said it would implement new services such as high quality voice, HD video conferencing,...

Dr. Mai Liem Truc, former Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, said that it would be late for Vietnam when the authorities consider licensing 4G services.

"Licensing is supposed to be done sooner so they [telecoms] have time to prepare. Currently, 3G network is slow. If network operators meet technical standards, they should be licenced. State management agencies should be neutral, and should not interfere in technology. Otherwise, Vietnam will always run behind other countries," Truc said.

The quality of 3G services in Vietnam is reportedly not very good and the coverage is still modest. 

Ho Tri Dung, Director of Technology of Viettel Corporation, said that only 30 percent of Viettel subscribers use 3G services while the average for Asia is 45%. 

A report published by Ericsson in mid-2015 said that Vietnam was ranked 11th in the world for subscriber growth (with more than 2 million new subscribers in the first quarter 2015), but lagged far behind other countries in the region on average transmission speed.

Of the nine countries in Southeast Asia and Oceania in the survey, Vietnam had the worst data transmission speed with 160 kilobits with per second (kbps), compared to 21,870 kbps of Singapore and 11,190 kbps of Australia, which took the lead in the region. Even that of Myanmar – which ranked No. 8 in the region and only one spot above Vietnam, was five times higher. 
Source: vietnamnet.vn