Viettel Quang Binh: Growing up with Community Development

With its relentless efforts to overcome difficulties and seek out appropriate directions, Viettel Quang Binh, a branch of military-run telecom firm Viettel, always completes its business tasks and contributes to the social, economic and cultural development of Quang Binh province. By completing programmes providing preferred internet connections for education establishments and offering telecom service packages designed for offshore fishermen, Viettel Quang Binh has become a friendly and reliable partner for people in the sunny and windy province.

 

In a bid to step up IT application in the education sector, promote human resource development to meet local demand, and narrow the divide between mountainous, rural and urban areas, in September 2008, the Ministry of Education and Training associated with Viettel Group to launch a programme that provided internet connections to all educational and training establishments, schools and kindergartens across the country.

According to this policy, Viettel Quang Binh completed connecting internet services with 418 out of 607 schools in Quang Binh province. Internet access is not available in remaining schools because they do not have electricity.

 

Mr Le Thanh Phong, Director of Viettel Quang Binh, said: "In a province where three-fourths of the area is mountainous, the terrain is complex and transport is difficult, the sooner internet service is available to schools, the less disadvantage teachers and students there suffer. However, internet connectivity for schools is only the initial condition and, to bring internet services into full play, Viettel wishes to have the cooperation of many enterprises and other organisations.” To complete installation of cables, the branch’s technicians had to move from mountains to mountains. The branch has to install very long lines to spread the service to target localities. For instance, it had to lay 40 km of optic cables to provide internet services for four schools in Truong Son commune, Quang Ninh district.

 

Viettel Quang Binh Branch is very active to provide best products and services for specific groups of users. Especially, Viettel supplies Sea+ package for offshore fishermen.

 

With the message “Go seafaring together,” Sea+ prepaid package is exclusively designed with special preferences and features for fishermen, helping them have better and safer lives. Users get free updates with weather information (daily news, tornado warning, storm warning) and information about emergency telephone numbers to call for help in case of danger. Viettel also built operators coded 1111 to answer direct questions about marine weather, with service charge of VND1,000 per minute for Sea+ package.

 

The highlighted feature of this package is emergency text notification sent via operator number, 1111. With this feature, users can register up to 10 phone numbers to send emergency notices. In case of problems, they only need to send a message to number 1111, it will be automatically forwarded to registered phone numbers. The service charge for a successful message is VND1,000. Viettel is considering an emergency voice feature via the operator 1111.

 

Fishermen often go fishing in groups (from 3 to 5 vessels) with each trip lasting months. Therefore, to help users to keep in touch with relatives and friends during their voyages, Viettel offers an economy package for Sea+ service users. Accordingly, with a monthly fee of VND10,000, users can register 10 mobile numbers for a 50 percent charge discount for outgoing calls to those numbers.