Hanoi - Communist Vietnam's internal police agency is going into the mobile telephony business, a government official said Monday. A company affiliated with the Ministry of Public Security will be granted a license to operate a new mobile phone network, along with two foreign partners, according to Pham Hong Hai, director of the Telecoms Department at the Ministry of Information and Communications.
The new network, to be named GTel Mobile, will be Vietnam's seventh. It will operate on the GSM system.
"We will license the network right away, within the year, after we arrange an appropriate frequency for it," Hai said.
The network will be operated by the Ministry of Public Security's GTel Co., Russia's Vimpelcom and the US's Millennium Global Solution Group, according to the Vietnam Economic Times.
Vimpelcom contemplates investing up to a billion dollars in the network over the next several years, according to the company's website.
Vietnam currently has three mobile networks using GSM technology and three using CDMA. One of the current CDMA networks is operated by Viettel, a company owned by the Ministry of Defense.
Hai said one other network, HT Mobile, has applied for a license to switch from CDMA technology to GSM, and that the license is likely to be granted this year.
Vietnam, with a population of 86 million, signed up 18.5 million new telephone subscribers in 2007, raising the total number in the country to 46 million. 75 per cent of those subscriptions are for mobile phones.
