The Hanoi Times - Broadband use will continue to grow strongly this year despite the global economic crisis. With demand for advanced services and technologies continuing to rise, broadband internet win would be used for watching o­nline TV and sharing data by businesses to improve their efficiency, experts said.

"The internet market will continue to grow by 60 to 70 per cent a year and the broadband segment even faster," said Truong Dinh Anh, director of FPT Telecom, a unit of the Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology.

"Data transfer o­n portable devices offers plenty of potential in Viet Nam," he added.

The experts said that though there were six broadband internet providers, competition was mainly between three major players who together account for more than 90 per cent of ADSL subscribers.

The Viet Nam Datacommunications Company (VDC), a subsidiary of the State-owned Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications Group, has over 1.4 million subscribers, the military-run Viettel 700,000, and FPT Telecom 600,000.

NetNam, SPT and EVN Telecom share the remaining 10 per cent.

Expansion plans

The VDC said last December it added an international internet channel with a capacity Gbps (Gigabytes per second) raising the total international line capacity to 31.5 Gbps.

This would allow the company to provide many new value-added services and to increase the international internet capacity two-fold at a cost of US$1 billion, VDC said.

"Increasing the international capacity will meet customers' demand for higher speed, better transmission quality and less network congestion in rush hours," said VDC Director Vu Hoang Lien.

Viettel has also laid 25,000km of fibre optic cable, increasing total length to 58,000km, the largest network in the country.