VietNamNet Bridge – The General Statistics Office (GSO) has reported the same number of Internet subscribers of 4.4 million subscribers for the months from April to July. However, IT firms have affirmed the number of Internet subscribers has been increasing steadily.

Internet service providers all have said there are some problems with the calculation method followed by GSO.

Nguyen Van Khoa, General Director of FPT Telecom, said on Thoi bao Kinh te Vietnam that the number of Internet subscribers at FPT Telecom keeps rising, though the monthly growth rates are different. He also said that July was the month that witnessed the highest growth rate in the number of Internet subscribers so far.

Nguyen Van Hai, Director of VDC, the enterprise which is holding the biggest broadband market share in Vietnam, has also affirmed that the number of Internet subscribers has been increasing steadily, even though it’s difficult to expand the number of subscribers in the current economic downturn.

“Some subscribers have terminated contracts, while some have registered services. However, in general, the number of broadband Internet subscribers at VDC still has increased by more than 10 percent so far this year,” Hai said.

A senior executive of NetNam has said that it would be really worrying if the number of Internet subscribers did not increase in the last four months.

He said it’s necessary to clarify what data sources GSO referred to when it calculated the number of new subscribers.

The Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC) still has reported the increases in the number of subscribers. Meanwhile, the report by GSO itself also showed the increase of 100,000 subscribers every month in April-June.

As for NetNam, the number of new Internet subscribers increased by 8 percent over June, the figure described as nearly the same with the previous months.

Explaining this, GSO said that its monthly reports about Internet subscribers show the numbers of ADSL broadband Internet subscribers, provided by VNNIC, an arm of the Ministry of Information and Communication.

Regarding the same reported figure of 4.4 million subscribers, GSO said that the statistics agency rounded the figure up/down. In fact, the exact figures would be 4.33 million, 4.36 million, 4.4 million and 4.44 million subscribers for April, May, June and July, respectively.

Since 2010, Vietnam has always been listing its name in the list of top 20 countries with the highest numbers of Internet users with 30 percent of population using Internet services. Meanwhile, experts have said that with the lowest Internet service fee in the world, the number of Internet subscribers would increase rapidly in the upcoming years.

Buu dien has quoted VNNIC as saying that Vietnam ranked the 18th among the 20 countries in the first quarter of 2012.

By March 31, 2012, Vietnam had had 30,858,742 Internet users, accounting for 34.1 percent of the total population and 1.4 percent of the world’s population.

With the figures, Vietnam ranks the eighth in Asia and third in South East Asia to Indonesia and the Philippines in terms of Internet users.

Prior to 2000, only 200,000 Vietnamese people used Internet services, while the number has increased by 15 times after 12 years.

Netnam’s General Director Vu The Binh said that the ranking should be seen as an encouraging result in the current context of the economic downturn, especially if noting that Vietnam ranks the 13th in the world in terms of population.

C. V