HA NOI — Military-owned mobile phone service provider Viettel will invest US$300 million in Haiti’s telecommunications market, following a market survey that has already neared completion, said Viettel deputy general director Tong Viet Trung.
Viettel would invest in the construction of network infrastructure as well as an improved fixed-line network in Haiti, Trung said, with construction to begin in October on over 1,000 base transmission stations and services to be launched as early as the first quarter of next year.
The Haitian telecommunications market was promising because there were currently only two mobile service providers in this country and Viettel hoped to quickly affirm its position in such a high-potential market, Trung said.
Earlier, Viettel signed a $99 milllion deal to buy a 60-per-cent stake in Haiti’s state-owned Teleco that enabled Viettel to provide wireless and mobile phone services and international undersea optical cables.
In addition to operations in Laos and Cambodia, Viettel was expanding investment in a number of other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. — VNS
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COMMENT: HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG
This deal is still suspect.
Picking a provider that is 12,000 miles away, when better ones are withing a couple of American Airlines away from Haiti is very strange. Wars are lost because supply lines are too long.
In retrospect, this will be seen as another disaster for the Haitian people.
Someone (Preval) was paid a great deal of money to approve this one in which the “pot-of-gold” is controlled by someone totally foreign to the Haitian situation.
There must be a lot of money in Haitian telephones. I can remember when the Peoples’ Republic of China offered Franck Cine $200,000,000 for a share of Haitel.
Too bad we can’t keep control of our own businesses.
I applaud the decision of the government to sell government owned agencies to foreign investors. We can now partially guarantee that lots of people will have jobs and more taxes will be collected by the govt. I only hope in the near future, we can privatise the others so that we, haitians, can have access to basic infrastructures; CAMEP, EDH, UEH, APN, AAN, CNE…
No one is a Saint.