VNPT has dramatically cut charges on international telephone and leased line services. The reduction for outgoing international phone service is between 12 to 25%.

Notably, the group’s cutting down of the charges for leased line service via undersea optical cable has put great pressure on Viettel, which holds the second position in this field after VNPT, making the gap between the first and the second wider.

However, the reduction of leased line service by 20 to 50% is welcomed by telecom firms because so far they have had to pay high fees for this service.

The telecom service market is heating up now that the mobile service providers are ushering in a new phase of charge reduction. Though all of them complain that the mobile charges are now near production costs, customers still believe that there are many reasons for mobile information service charges to continue decreasing.

Three mobile information networks, MobiFone, VinaPhone of VNPT and Viettel Mobile, and even S-Fone, have state capital (wholly or partly), so they are ‘bound’ more tightly to the Prime Minister’s instruction on inflation checking.

Several months have passed since Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung issued Decision 39 on the management of postal and telecom service charges (allowing telecom service providers to fix charges themselves), but mobile networks haven’t been able to do so because of the lack of a guidance document from the Ministry of Information and Communications.

MobiFone now takes the lead in turnover in the field of mobile information services, with VND1,000 billion ($62.5 million) per month. According to some anonymous sources, this network is eagerly waiting for the approval of telecom charge reductions in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Meanwhile, Viettel Mobile takes the lead in the number of mobile subscribers, with around 10 million, occupying the position that belonged to VinaPhone for a long period.

More changes in rankings in the telecom service market are said will occur from now to the lunar New Year (Tet) when mobile service providers apply new charges.