Myanmar expands fibre optic cable to 31,000 kilometres

THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2016
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Myanmar has expanded its fibre optic cable to 31,000 kilometres this year, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communication.

Myanmar had only used the SEA-ME-WE 3 fibre optic cable previously, but people in the country will be able enjoy the benefits of the SEA-ME-WE 5 and AAE1 cables soon.
 
The inland fibre optic cables link Muse and Myawady to Thailand, and in the 2015-16 fiscal year, a new inland fibre optic cable linked Tachilek to Thailand.
 
Three phone service providers operate in Myanmar.
 
International bandwidth has reached to over 200 Gbps in 2016, which is nearly seven times the country’s capacity in 2013. Although the number of telecommunication towers in Myanmar was under 3,000 before the foreign were introduced, the number of telecommunication towers in Myanmar reached over 11,700 in 2016, sources say.
 
Myanmar was home to 460,000 land line phone numbers and 5.3 million SIM cards before foreign telecom operators had been granted operating licences, bringing mobile penetration up to 43.72 million people in 2016. The number of land lines has not changed much.
 
“When we made arrangements to provide assistance to the education sector, but we faced with weak infrastructure. The ICT sector in Myanmar has improved a lot since 2012. It is too early to make a judgment on the current government compared to the former government as the period of the current government has been very short,” said Elaine Weidman Grunewald, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer from Ericsson Group.