Key ICT Information

• Telephone density in Myanmar is 0.6%, which can be considered as one of the lowest in the world. In urban areas, such as Yangon and Mandalay the teledensity is 3.6% and 2.3% respectively.
• Myanmar Post and Telecom (MPT) is only one telecommunication operator and is state owned.
• There are 102 auto-switches in the country, most of which are analogue.
• There are two universities of computer studies and 22 computer colleges under the Ministry of Science and Technology, which are equipped with facilities similar to those universities run by the Ministry of Education. 25,000 ICT professionals will be graduating annually starting from 2004.

Standardization

• Standardization of the Myanmar character code set has been completed and approved according to ISO 10646 and UNICODE standard. Currently, more than 50 fonts with various codes are in use in Myanmar.
  

Technology

• The telecommunications network uses digital technology, with 2 Mbps as the primary base band, together with an 8 GHz band microwave radio carrier.
• Some low-frequency provide computers with access to the Internet to all schools. The government has earmarked a special budget of Nu 5 million every year for this purpose.

Initiatives

There are a number of projects and pilot projects underway supervised by the e-Application Working Committee:

e-Passport Project

The project was rolled out in October 2002 for frequent travellers and government officials. The e-passport was introduced for authentication and access control with a biometric system using an embedded chip.

Smart Card Project

The Smart Card pilot project was carried out at one of the ministries and will continue at various ministries as well as general public applications such as vehicle registration, border pass and banking.

Smart School

With the cooperation of Malaysia, the Smart School pilot project was introduced at three primary and high schools in Yangon. The content development according to the curriculum is also underway. The connectivity for these three schools was provided by BCT. It will also sponsor the connectivity for an additional 100 schools with multimedia classrooms to create the SchoolNet in Myanmar.

Certification Authority

One of the projects is to set up a National Certification Authority. Other pilot projects involve an e-Procurement System and Trade Electronic Data Interchange, and On-line Account Trade.

Source: Digital Review for Asia Pacific