Vietnam telco giant partners with U.S. firm to boost Internet connectivity

Vietnam’s telecom giant Viettel has picked equipment made by the U.S.-based Juniper Networks to scale up its consumer mobile and fixed broadband services.

Juniper announced Monday that the Vietnamese giant will use its high performance, reliable and scalable networking equipment to upgrade its operations and retain its position as the leading service provider in Vietnam while expanding to other countries.

The cooperation will help Viettel upgrade its carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) capacity to meet increasing traffic growth and leverage the additional processing power required for seamless network address translation, the US firm said.

The upgrade will empower Viettel to operate the seamless co-existence of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in its network, meeting the growing demand for mobile and broadband services across urban and rural areas while maximizing its public IPv4 addresses, it added.

It noted that Viettel has made the move as Vietnam’s networking demands from its increasingly digitally-savvy populace keeps increasing, aligning with the government’s push to drive economic growth through technology.

It did not disclose further details.

Vietnam was home to 85.7 million mobile broadband service subscribers and the number of smartphone users was 101.1 million as of end June 2023, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications. The ratio of people using the Internet is 78.6% of the population, while the number of broadband Internet subscribers was 22.1 million, the ministry added.

The information-communications sector reaped revenues of VND1,614 trillion ($67.76 billion) in the first half of this year, contributing VND45,905 billion ($1.93 billion) to the state budget, the ministry said.