Vietnamese leading telecommunications firm Viettel is supporting an initiative to popularize telecom services in under-served and rural areas within Mozambique. This initiative considers telecom provision as a commodity, which must be accessible in spite of financial capacity or geographical location.

According to Nguyen Thai Khang, who is the Head of ICT division at ICTNews, Viettel has invested in a service support, network and introduction of social programs to enable the accessibility of telecom services to citizens in rural areas as part of making their lives better.

“Viettel aims at sustaining social development. It benefits both the company and customers by bringing to every Mozambique citizen mobile phones as well as broadband internet to each family,” added Khang.

Khang also noted that after the initiative was implemented two years ago, Movitel, the joint venture between Viettel and Mozambique’s SPI Company, addressed difficulties incurred because of limited transportation infrastructure. Additionally, it developed a diversified distribution channel consisting of 12,600 agents and points of sales, 153 shops and almost 4,000 direct sales staffs to deliver door-to-door services in each village.

“Almost 600, 000 people in at least five rural districts have been covered and served with telecom services for the first time in life. Tariff plans have been adjusted to be flexible and affordable for various groups,” stated Khang.

Movitel is largely contributing to altering the information communication landscape within Mozambique thanks to its firm network infrastructure. It now accounts 50 percent of the mobile phone network infrastructure and 70 percent of the country’s fiber optical cable infrastructure, which puts Mozambique among the leading three nations in terms of fiber optical cabling infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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