Telecom news
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KOREA AND CHINA DOMINATE THE VIETNAMESE MOBILE MARKET SOURCE; COUNTERPOINT RESEARCH: QUARTERLY MARKET MONITOR Q2 2018
eSim Coming to Vietnam: Vietnam’s top three mobile phone operators are implementing eSim. These are electronic SIMs (or the way that the carrier identifies the phone and allows it to use the network). With eSims, you wouldn’t need a physical SIM card, and you could have multiple carrier agreements and switch between then easily. Google (maker of Android) and Apple both support this, at least for some of their phones. Some carriers also support it, including the three major players in Vietnam. It looks like this will happen fairly soon.
5G Coming to Vietnam: The second piece of news is that Vietnam will start testing 5G in 2019, and it should be implemented over the next two years. Again, this depends on carrier investments and if your phone supports it. Xiaomi supports it with one phone already, Samsung will support it in some phones coming out this year, according to news reports. Samsung, Oppo and Xiaomi all are developing 5G phones to launch in 2019 (not sure yet if these will be sold in Vietnam, but I assume so). Apple may take a bit longer. Right now those first three represent about 64% of sales in Vietnam, and Apple just 5%.
Both of these will require some investing from the telecom operators. Obviously much more for 5G. And both of these advancements will help advance the internet of things. For eSim, that means that smaller devices can have a SIM now and connect to networks. We saw this with the Apple Watch. And the faster speeds from 5G should help drive innovation - now people will be able to move large amounts of data quickly and inexpensively. If you think of the whole arc of telecommunications and the internet as being cheaper and faster data transfer, then we should expect some very interesting innovations.
At this point, developing country mobile phone markets like Vietnam are basically no different (in terms of technological advancement) than developed markets, especially the US, which is slow and overpriced.