Military regime weighs heavily on Myanmar’s telecom sector
Myanmar’s telecommunications sector continues to be dominated by the state-owned monopoly telephone service provider, Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). With the military government’s conservative approach to structural reform, it was not surprising that MPT continues to maintain its monopoly over the telecom sector, being the sole national telephone network operator.
The MPT drafted a 20-year master plan, the period 1990 to 2010, and under this plan a range of different projects have been implemented over the years to improve the underdeveloped network. The expansion has been characterised, however, by a somewhat erratic rate of progress. Nevertheless, the country had managed to move from around 100,000 installed fixed lines to more than one million in 2009. Over the same time period the number of fixed-line subscribers increased from 76,000 to just over 800,000. Despite this more than tenfold increase, however, coming into 2010 the country’s fixed-line penetration was still less than 2%.
The dispersion of network infrastructure has been heavily biased towards the cities, with Yangon and Mandalay having estimated telephone penetrations of 6% and 4% respectively. According to the ITU, the official waiting list for telephone services stood at 106,000 by end-2004 and had increased to 250,000 by 2008. (There has been no updated figure published since then.) The installation of new telephone services could often take years. This was despite the fact that MPT said it had been expanding the network by approximately 15% each year. To catch up on demand, it was estimated that MPT would need to install more than 500,000 new telephone lines in a short period of time. This would represent a capital investment of around US$600 million, money that was simply not available.
Foreign investment in the telecom sector continued to stay low, due to the political situation in Myanmar, the structure of the country’s telecom industry and the general state of the economy, this also being despite the government’s attempts to increase foreign interest. Investment in the telecom sector has been running at less than US$6 million per year. By 2009 most villages in Myanmar were still without a fixed-line telephone service. read all
