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Ministry plans tariff rise for fixed phones
The Ministry of Information and Communications said it was planning to 1 raise the intra province calling tariff on fixed telephone services, which are considered under the cost prices.
The ministry said most fixed telephone service providers had long lamented that the more they expanded their services, the more losses they incurred.
According to the plan, the tariff for intra province calls will be increased from the current VND120 per minute to VND200 per minute, starting from next year until 2010.
Meanwhile, the monthly subscription fee will be reduced from the current VND27,000 to VND20,000 in a bid to attract new users.
In addition, providers after 2010 will be allowed to adjust the tariffs in accordance to market changes but not exceed the ministry's ceiling tariff.
According to the ministry, by the end of September 2008, Vietnam had 70.4 million telephone subscribers, representing 82 id phones per 100 residents.
Fixed phone subscribers to accounted for nearly 19 per cent, equivalent to 13 million subscribers.
The country had 3.7 million new subscribers in September, an increase of 362 per cent year-on-year, raising the total number of new phone users so far this year to 23.4 million.
In a separate development, the Ministry of Information and Communications has officially granted, a licence to Mobifone to launch its fifth new prefix mobile phone number 0121 to deliver mobile communications for customers across the country.
It is estimated that the new mobile prefix 0121 will help the company serve 7 million new subscribers. The mobile prefix 0126 launched three months ago, is now widely used. Mobifone now has 090, 093, 0122 and 0126 as prefixes.
Dinh Viet Hung, an official of the company said they signed up almost 70,000-80,000 new subscribers a day, especially, after Mobifone launched The Mobi365 package for low income customers. As a result, the number of Mobifone subscribers has reached nearly 25 million.
VNN
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