The Ministry of Information and Communications has recently published a Draft Circular amending the “National technical regulation on quality of Internet access services on terrestrial mobile telecommunications networks” for comments.
The most notable in this revision is the addition of minimum speed regulations for 3G and 4G Internet services. Specifically, 4G networks (LTE, LTE-A) in areas providing Internet access services on terrestrial mobile telecommunications networks must have a minimum download speed of 40Mbps, while the network (WCDMA minimum 1Mb/s) second.
Quarterly, the Ministry will test the quality of 4G Internet access services and require at least 95% of samples to have download speeds greater than or equal to this value.
Currently, the minimum speed is not regulated, but is announced by the carriers themselves. But in fact, the announced speed of enterprises is much lower, only 40% of the actual speed according to the test results of the Department, statistics (May 2023) from the I-speed tool (Ministry of Information and Communications). -TT), Speedtest tool (Ookla).
According to the Ministry of Information and Communications, the addition of regulations on minimum speed for 3G and 4G Internet services will help promote businesses to improve service quality, increase competitiveness, increase international rankings, and help subscribers know the actual service quality.
This regulation is also evaluated in accordance with the general situation of the region, when the minimum speed of 4G network in the Asia-Pacific region is 31 Mbps, globally is 30 Mbps.
And in the near future, mobile businesses in Vietnam will also be added new bands to serve the deployment of 4G broadband.
However, according to some telecommunications experts, this regulation will be a challenge for carriers in Vietnam because the average speed of the network depends on many factors such as the number of users more or less, the amount of frequency. for network technologies. Therefore, the average speed of the network will have to be many times higher than this number to meet the requirement that 95% of the measured samples reach 40 Mbps.
Securing 4G speeds will make it difficult for carriers, especially in the context of Vietnam’s transition to 5G. In addition, experts say that with the announced download speed of 15-16 Mbp, a video experience of up to 2K resolution is guaranteed.