The participants at the seminar on the future of Vietnam’s Internet held by the Vietnam Internet Association and ICT Journalists’ Association several days ago all mentioned a new technology trend in Vietnam – wi-fi.

Vietnam clearly is not the country with high broadband development rating. However, foreign tourists highly appreciate Vietnam’s large coverage wi-fi at tourism sites, while most of them provide free wi-fi services.

“If you travel abroad, you would realize that the Internet services in Vietnam are very cheap,” said Nguyen Van Hai, Director of VASC, an information technology service provider.

“I have returned from a business trip. The hotel where I stayed in Europe charged 2 euro per minute of accessing Internet, and 240 euro per day,” he said.

“If you are lucky, you can use Internet free of charge for 10 minutes at the reception. Meanwhile, nearly all guest houses and cafés in Vietnam provide free wi-fi to clients,” he added.

It’s difficult to charge fee on wi-fi services

Speaking at the seminar, Nguyen Cong Toan, Director of the Northern Infrastructure Development Center which is an arm of FPT Telecom, also said that in Singapore, France and Cambodia, wi-fi is not free of charge. In Cambodia, for example, it is easy to find more than 10 places which provide wi-fi services nearby, but users have to pay nearly one dollar for every hour of using.

Previously, FPT once ran a project on developing free wi-fi services to buildings, restaurants and cafés in 2005. At the highest peak, FPT once had nearly 10,000 points with free wi-fi coverage in Hanoi and HCM City. However, FPT had to stop the project in 2008, because the devices used to access wi-fi at that time were mainly laptops. At that time, the number of users was still modest, while there were just indoors services provided at public places, such as cafes.

“After a period of providing services, some shortcomings had arisen, relating to the habit of users,” said Nguyen Cong Toan.

The problem is that FPT required users to enter usernames and passwords, but this still made clients feel inconvenient. A lot of cafes’ owners would rather spend some hundreds of thousands of dong to act as hotspots than using service free of charge, but have to spend time to enter passwords.

Regarding the idea of charging wi-fi services, Toan said that it would be very difficult to do that, once free wi-fi is available everywhere.

Toan said that currently, if enterprises increase the providing of wi-fi services, they will have high number of clients, when the amount of laptops sold by supermarkets accounts for 60 percent, while more than 98 percent of mobile devices are equipped with wi-fi foundation.

With the boom of laptops and smartphones, nearly 100 percent of the devices have wi-fi foundation, while 3G is just optional.

In Vietnam, service providers are ready to provide wi-fi services which allow clients to access to Internet anywhere. However, the thing that causes a headache to people is that what to do to persuade people to pay for the services, while in minds of people, wi-fi services are free.

While FPT Telecom has expressed its worry about the business opportunities with wi-fi services, Dong Duong Telecom believes that businesses now have great potential with the services. Nguyen Anh Chien, Deputy General Director of Dong Duong Telecom said in the past, FPT Telecom one targeted wi-fi, but at that time, the production costs were relatively high. Meanwhile, it is now the right time to develop the services, when smart phones have become more popular. With just one million dong, people can buy a smart phone with wi-fi foundation.

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