Country watch: Vietnam

Date: 27.04.2004

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IT Policies

Consolidation of the Government IT management apparatus

Between July 2002 and July 2003, the most important policies focused on the formation and consolidation of State organizations that oversea IT and telecommunications industries:

The establishment of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (July 2002)

The establishment of the Action Plan Steering Board to implement Directive 58-CT/TW by the Politburo on the faster application and development of the IT industry in the industrialization and modernization during 2001-2005.

For the first time, the Government IT management apparatus was formed, which has a coherent and strong structure consisting of three departments, four bureaus and one institute (the Post and Telecommunications Departments for Region 1, 2 and 3, the Strategy Institute, the Planning – Finance Bureau, the Science Technology Bureau (responsible for IT application), the IT Industry Bureau and the Telecommunications Bureau.

Telecommunications - Internet

A series of decisions issued by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications continued to lower Internet charges.

New policies allowed new services: PC to Phone Telephony and ADSL broadband Internet connection, xSDL-WAN, CDMA.

Telecommunications monopoly was gradually abolished, allowing other enterprises to take part in providing telecommunications services: new licenses were given to a number of enterprises to provide telecommunications, Internet connections services and long-distance domestic and international telephone services using Internet Protocol.

ITU ranking: Every year, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) issues a ranking of 196 countries. This ranking has the biggest number of countries and is based on indicators like the number of fixed telephone lines, mobile phones, computers and Internet users.

Vietnam’s ranking among 196 countries was as follows:

IT application

Finally, after a lot of debate, the issue of Unicode and the Vietnamese language has been decided: the Prime Minister made a final decision on using the Vietnamese character coding based on TCVN 6909: 2001 standard in electronic data exchange among organizations of the Party and the Government.

The Ministry of Culture and Information issued a regulation on the administration and licensing of Internet content providers.

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