Price-Value Seems to Deter Switch to Fiber to Home in Vietnam

In Vietnam, DSL is currently the technology of choice, with 4,472,036 people connected in this way. A total of 280,127 subscribers use FTTH  services. But growth of fiber to home customers is substantial, and although the overall numbers are small, cable TV  access could be a factor at some point.

Since 2014, uptake of fiber to home subscriptions has accelerated, although digital subscriber line remains the overwhelming access technology, at about 4.6 million units in 2014, compared to some 403,000 fiber to home accounts.

Significantly, availability is not as great an issue as retail cost or perceptions of price compared to value. Though fiber to home services cost more than digital subscriber line, in major metro areas, the price difference is not too wide.

FTTH costs about US$16.60 a month, and DSL only costs a bit less, in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. But FTTH speeds might be only 12 Mbps. In other words, the FTTH performance advantage, compared to DSL, might be so great.

A survey of business users found FTTH take rates of about seven percent in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.  

The Vietnamese Government has set itself the target of achieving seven million broadband subscribers across Vietnam by the end of 2015 and wants this figure to rise to more than 19 million by 2020. What remains unclear are the access platforms to be used to reach those goals.

In Vietnam, to showcase another big change, huge new deployments of fixed network infrastructure using optical fiber have recently been made, and where fixed network high speed access adoption has grown over 1,000 percent since 2005.

Still, with costs for home passed, using GPON-based fiber to home platforms, still above $1,500 per location, fiber to home costs will be prohibitive in many instances. In 2011, most fixed network high speed access connections in Vietnam were supplied using asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), a copper-based technology.

In Vietnam, DSL is currently the technology of choice, with 4,472,036 people connected in this way. A total of 280,127 subscribers use FTTH  services.

The Vietnamese Government has set itself the target of achieving seven million broadband subscribers across Vietnam by the end of 2015 and wants this figure to rise to more than 19 million by 2020. What remains unclear are the access platforms to be used to reach those goals.