Vietnamese company Viettel is interested in the development of the 3G network in Ukraine, said Alexey Shovkoplyas, Ukrainian ambassador to Vietnam, as reported by Ukrainian online publication Inventure.
Viettel is prepared to invest $1 billion towards the development of their own network and would like to obtain licenses for the GSM-1800 (10 MHz), GSM-900 (5 MHz), and UMTS-frequency (10 MHz) bands. The company would also like to offer Internet service, for which it wants to build a 60,000km cable network.
Viettel Group Corporation is the largest mobile operator in Vietnam and has recently entered foreign markets, maintaining networks in Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Haiti. Viettel currently serves 63 million subscribers.
In March 2011, Viettel signed a memorandum with Ukraine’s State Agency for Investment and National Projects regarding the possibility of investment totaling $600 million in the telecommunications sector. At that time, the government wanted to attracted investment to the national project “Open World,” which would have offered access to 4G Internet to more than one million students.
This past summer, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he was astounded that Ukraine was one of the last countries in the world where 4G technology has not been implemented and 3G is weakly deployed.
Those technologies have not been launched in the country yet because of corruption, the president stated. “But I am convinced that 4G is not just a communications technology. It is a stimulus for the economy that will enhance the budget, reform the state order, and so on,” he added.
A competition for the 3G network is due to take place by the end of the year.
This story first appeared in Ukraine Digital News, the English-language online resource on Ukraine’s IT industries.
