A MIC representative at the regular press conference on August 8 spoke about the establishment and development of MVNOs in Vietnam.

MVNO are telecom carriers that don’t own telecommunication infrastructure but can provide mobile services by leasing traffic from other operators.

MIC has licensed five carriers to provide MVNO services in Vietnam: Indochina Telecom, Mobicast, ASIM, Deigilife and VNSky.

VNSky is the newcomer in the market which presented itself publicly on July 7. It has the prefix number 0777 and belongs to the VNPay ecosystem.

According to the Authority of Telecommunications, as of April 30, 2023, there were 2.65 million MVNO subscribers, accounting for 2.1 percent of total subscribers of the Vietnamese mobile phone market.

Deputy head of the Authority of Telecommunications Nguyen Phong Nha said MVNOs now only have a small number of users.

In order to develop, MVNO needs to design services that can benefit users, such as financial and educational services, or services in niche markets unreachable by large mobile network operators.

This will help promote the development of content services, and create more telecommunication services on broadband internet.

According to Nha, as MVNOs don’t own infrastructure and don’t have to follow procedures to get licenses for frequencies, the regulations on services are less strict. 

MVNOs only have to sign contracts on buying SIM from other mobile network operators to be able to begin providing services.

When amending the Law on Telecommunications, the Authority of Telecommunications included provisions on wholesale policy to create a more transparent legal framework, helping network operators negotiate the purchase of traffic in order to provide high-quality services at reasonable costs.

“MVNOs need to find niche markets attractive enough to maintain stable amounts of subscribers and have high ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) compared with the current average level,” Nha said.

The development of MVNOs will bring positive factors to the market as it increases competitiveness in the mobile market. The re-sale of traffic in packages to other mobile network operators is seen as an effective solution to share network operation costs and shorten the time needed to take back the initial investment capital.

Trong Dat