08 April 2022

Efforts to expand Nepal’s telecom sector have faced many challenges over the years. For one, the country’s mountainous topography makes it extremely difficult (and costly) to build out the necessary infrastructure. Nepal has also struggled with a series of adverse economic situations, largely caused by political instability.

Because of the first major hurdle, Nepal’s fixed-line services are mainly concentrated in the Kathmandu area. Here, teledensity is substantially higher than the relatively meagre coverage available in rural regions. There has been some progress in recent years towards growing the national PSTN, based on a network of digital microwave links. Nepal Telecom has also been active in rolling out a fibre network between the major business areas and various district headquarters around the country. That being said, the overall penetration rate for fixed-line telephony services is still less than 3%. Most voice traffic is channeled via Nepal’s mobile networks.

20 December 2021

Even with Covid-19 pandemic-related mobility restrictions in place, Vietnam’s economy has continued to outperform the rest of the region in 2020 and 2021. Nevertheless, the telecom sector essentially spent most of this period in a holding pattern, focusing on maintaining service throughout the crisis while preparing for some major changes to come in the mobile market in 2022.

Both fixed-line telephony and mobile have experienced small drops in subscriber numbers since the start of the pandemic, but the similarities between the two markets end there. Fixed-line teledensity continued its downwards trajectory towards virtual oblivion, with just 3% penetration (around 3 million subscribers) at the start of 2021. The mobile market has lost about the same number of subscribers since the end of 2019, but has been sitting on much higher penetration levels around 130% for many years.