The Fiber to the X (FTTx) technology has the advantages of high and stable upload and download speeds and will gradually replace ADSL to dominate the Internet broadband market. FTTx includes four types, including FTTN (Fiber To The Node); FTTC (Fiber To The Curb); FTTB (Fiber To The Building) and FTTH (Fiber To The Home)

In Vietnam, FPT Telecom is the first telecom company that provides FTTH services, followed by the Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Group VNPT and Viettel. The latest comer on the market is CMC Telecom Infrastructure belonging to CMC Technologies Group. On April 10, 2010, CMC officially joined the market by providing optical cable services with GigaNet brand.

Of the current service providers, VNPT and its subsidiary VDC remains the enterprise which is holding the biggest market share. The report released in 2010 by VDC showed that by July 2010, Vietnam had had seven FTTH service providers, but the three giants VNPT, FPT and Viettel still have the highest numbers of subscribers. They now have 57.63 percent, 25.12 percent and 13.42 percent of the total number of subscribers, respectively. The main clients of the FTTH services are enterprises and institutions.

Since it officially launched FiberVNN in May 2010, VDC has seen a considerable growth rate in its market share. However, forecasts say that the current service providers will have to share the market with another big name – CMC. Right at the launching of the service, the enterprise announced that this will be the strategic service of the company which will allow it to set foot on the Vietnamese market. Therefore, CMC has heavily invested to develop the services.

CMC’s high-speed fiber service GigaNet has a high speed of 2.5Gbps and it has big advantages in using synchronous optical fiber from the service provider to the computing labs of clients. Therefore, the transmission quality is stable, the transmission line is not influenced by electromagnetic interference, bad weather or cable length.

Most recently, CMC has released the information that CMC TI, a subsidiary of the group will invest tens of millions of dollars to develop fiber infrastructure in all central provinces and cities. Besides, CMC TI will also upgrade the infrastructure on the national and international backbones in order to ensure bandwidth for clients. 

The goal that CMC is striving for is that by the end of 2012, it will have the total number of Internet broadband subscribers (FTTH + FTTB) exceeding 50,000 subscribers throughout the country. The strategy shows the firm determination of the telecom service provider to conquer the Internet broadband market. In previous years, experts believed that the Internet broadband market would fall into the hands of VNPT/VDC, FPT and Viettel. Meanwhile, they have added CMC into the list.

According to experts, the biggest problem of FTTx service is that it has fees much higher than ADSL. Therefore, to date, businesses remain the main clients of FTTx services.

Currently, users have to pay one million dong a month for normal FTTx, while the charges could be 1.5-30 million dong for FTTH – GPON, depending on the speed. Meanwhile, when using ADSL, households and individuals only have to pay 100,000 dong a month to access Internet.

However, experts have predicted that in the near future, FTTx services will dominate the market, and that high fees will not be a big problem for service users any more, when service providers are trying to upgrade technologies and finding ways to lower the production costs. If so, FTTx with the advantages in technologies will be the choice of many Internet users.

The experts also believe that the replacement of FTTx services is inevitable. With the strong development of television services and digital content services worldwide, FTTH will completely replace ADSL. In 2011 the replacement process is already well underway.

Tuyet Ngan