Telenor Myanmar held a one year anniversary celebration for its monthly event Net Monday in People’s Park in Yangon on 9th March. In the event, nine speakers from Wikipedia, Huawei, Samsung, HTC, myjobs.com.mm and jobs in myanmar.com. More than nine hundred (900) tech-savvy guests were in the audience.
Net Monday is Telenor’s initiative to pro- mote “Internet for All” and opportunities enabled by mobile connectivity. In the ques- tion and answer section of the event, Net Monday partners and audience discussed about internet content and its importance, impact of using internet, faster than other periodicals, encouragement on joining the Myanmar Wikipedia team, internet safety and responsible user interaction by one of the panelists U Moe Kyaw and Network providers and handsets partners’ support in telecom industry.
“We believe that mobile connectivity is essential for everyone and with the mobile internet comes opportunities to develop both the communities in which you live and your personal life. To provide internet for all in Myanmar, we continue to develop our connectivity around the country step by step. For instance, we launched in Yangon with 348 towers in October 2014, but now we have grown to 625 towers. We have over 1600 towers around the country as of today and we expect to have between 3,000 and 4,000 towers by the end of this year,” said Petter Furberg, CEO of Telenor Myanmar. He also told the audience that while Telenor is providing both 2G and 3G network, one third of the mobile phone users in Myanmar are still 2G users. “The number of 3G users is very high but 2G is still very relevant for the mass market we are here to serve. We will continue to expand our whole network and bring more customers from 2G to 3G by increasing our 3G network and improving the internet speed. We are also continuing to evaluate 4G, which depends on the growth of 4G handsets, and which will re- quire more spectrum being released from the government,” said Mr. Furberg.
Sharad Mehrotra, CMO of Telenor Myanmar said: “Our two internet speeds, MY and SMART, are meeting the demands of the mass market. Good connectivity demands great and local content – we are focusing on working with talented local partners for basic value added services (VAS) whilst also leveraging on our global Telenor partnerships with digital giants such as Facebook, Google and Wikipedia.”
There have been Net Monday events in Yan- gon, Mandalay, Magwe and Bago, following Telenor’s mobile rollout areas. This has included special Net Monday events at Da- gon University, Mandalay University, Bago University, Magwe University and Mhawbi Technological University.
